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Guest blog post by Isabella Bellera, a lawyer Lawyer and human rights activist in Venezuela. She has been involved with different organizations that have came out of the Venezuelan Student Movement, such as "A world without censorship", Fundacion Futuro Presente and Defiende Tu Voto. Isabella and her team are planning to use Ushahidi for the 2012 elections in Venezuela. Here she shares lessons learned from the previous elections]
How we started
The 27th of may of 2007, the Venezuelan Government decided to shut down the most important and oldest television channel in the country, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV). Spontaneously, thousands of young people from all over the country decided to protest, for what they considered a huge attack on freedom of speech. This marked the beginning of the Venezuelan student movement.
Soon after that, President Chavez announced his intentions of modifying the Venezuelan Constitution. Student leaders that were still actively working to defend the right to freedom of speech, realized how significant the proposed changes were, and most importantly, that hardly anyone realized the impact it would have on their civil rights. They began to explain to Venezuelans the effect of the reform of each constitutional article on their daily basis and invited everyone to vote massively (in a time when nobody trusted the electoral organism and the biggest enemy to fight was abstentionism). Students knew that electoral rules and conditions weren´t clear, but decided to empower Venezuelans and promote voting as a sign of protest.
What did Venezuelan students do on electoral monitoring on this day (2nd December 2007)? Nothing. They just went to different electoral centers that day, invited people to vote using megaphones and gave water to people that were waiting in line. Nevertheless, there was a generalized perception that the student movement was extremely organized and had people monitoring everywhere. And it paid off, the reform of the constitution didn´t go through. It was the first election in history where President Chavez was defeated.
Young leaders realized then, they couldn´t rely only on being “percieved” as organized, they had to have a strategy in the future. Even though there were serious irregularities in the electoral process, they could be denounced and attacked by raising the level of participation of citizens during the process. Thats why Youth groups made an alliance with a venezuelan ngo called
ESDATA. This ngo had done an excellent study of the previous official electoral results and categorized electoral centers in three groups: greens, yellows and reds, according to different variables like the date of creation, location, previous irregular results. The expertice of ESDATA members and the networks developed by the student movement combined, inniciated a serious work on electoral monitoring in the country.
Our First Digital Experience: Chuletadeunidad.com (13m hits)
On next elections (23rd November 2008), when we had to elect governors and mayors, we did the first digital campaign that was called
chuletadeunidad.com, it was a site where people could put their identification number and could find out who their candidates were and what center where they were supposed to vote. That site had 13 million hits in just 10 days. We realized then, how big the usage of Internet was for electoral purposes. The mistake was, we didn’t had a place where people would offer themselves to volunteer.
NOESNO.NET (first attempt to get volunteers online to work on the elections) 17.800 people
Immediately after that, President Chavez announced again to Venezuelans that he wanted to amend the Constitution to establish his indefinitely reelection. So we launched noesno.net in order for us to capture volunteers. It was a huge success, 17.800 people signed to volunteer and approximately 12.000 people worked on electoral monitoring.
On the last elections, when people had to vote for their representatives in the congress. Young leaders launched
defiendetuvoto.com. (defend your vote). Like noesno.net it was a website where people could offer themselves to volunteer. This time they had the opportunity to choose to participate as: an observer, promoter (they would help people with special needs commute to the centers) or cuadrilla.
The concept of “Cuadrillas” was applied nationally for the first time (we had done a pilot trial in just one state previously). Cuadrillas are teams of 4 to 5 people that had the duty of monitoring 5 electoral centers that weren’t 2 kilometers away from each other. The preparation of these teams started 4 months before the election, because they had to be trained in electoral legislation and previously determined protocols to follow in case of facing irregularities.
Cuadrillas would inform the status of their centers to a situation room and actually solve problems like putting pressure when observers weren’t allowed to enter the centers to witness the process, demand the dismantlement of tents where there were people checking with lists if people had voted or not and distribute propaganda (those were the most common denounces). Using the information given by ESDATA, the defiendetuvoto.com team had Cuadrillas focused on the electoral centers that presented more irregularities in the past process.
On the election day, (26th of September 2010) the defiendetuvoto.com team had 12.000 volunteers working either as observers, promoters or cuadrillas. We processed 1794 denounces on critical (red category) centers and were able to solve 75% of them.
What Comes Next? --> 2012! Generacion Libre (Free Generation)
The entire job that I described above has been organized by a group of around 100 people, several networks we have developed around the country, and of course thousands of volunteers. There are of course more pro democratic groups in the country and we’re working to team up with them, so we can join efforts. Therefore, we have created “Generacion Libre”. This new platform will be an umbrella for young people that belong to ngos, political parties and universities. Many young leaders have already entered the project and it will be officially launched in February. It has 3 objectives: motivate young people from around the country to work together, set the national agenda and prepare with 2 years of anticipation the monitoring of 2012 elections.
Certainly, there have been really important lessons we have learned. One of them, is that technology can make a huge difference, but it has to be integrated with an excellent ¨offline work¨. If there`s someone that can use the data generated (through social networks, sms, call centers or whatever communication media) to actually solve situations in the street, you have a real impact on transparency.
Human Rights are not negotiable, through our work we invite venezuelan citizens to decide and actually build the kind of country they want, and never allow someone else to decide for them.