Tag Archives: nicaragua

How to hack a Latin American election

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Bloomberg has a fascinating longread on Andrés Sepúlveda, a man who claims that he rigged elections all over Latin America for almost a decade.

Here is an excerpt:

Sepúlveda’s career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasn’t cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few.

His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.

The whole thing, to borrow from Tyler Cowen’s vocabulary, is self-recommending. I am not a Latin Americanist and so cannot vouch for the veracity of the story. But it’s definitely a fantastic read.

And of course, as happens, a multi-country story of this nature is incomplete without casual stereotyping of hackers based on nationality:

For most jobs, Sepúlveda assembled a crew and operated out of rental homes and apartments in Bogotá. He had a rotating group of 7 to 15 hackers brought in from across Latin America, drawing on the various regions’ specialties. Brazilians, in his view, develop the best malware. Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans are superb at scanning systems and software for vulnerabilities. Argentines are mobile intercept artists. Mexicans are masterly hackers in general but talk too much. Sepúlveda used them only in emergencies.

Cash transfers do not make the poor lazy

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This is from the New York Times:

Abhijit Banerjee, a director of the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released a paper with three colleagues last week that carefully assessed the effects of seven cash-transfer programs in Mexico, Morocco, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Indonesia. It found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.”

A World Bank report from 2014 examined cash assistance programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America and found, contrary to popular stereotype, the money was not typically squandered on things like alcohol and tobacco.

Still, Professor Banerjee observed, in many countries, “we encounter the idea that handouts will make people lazy.”

Professor Banerjee suggests the spread of welfare aversion around the world might be an American confection. “Many governments have economic advisers with degrees from the United States who share the same ideology,” he said. “Ideology is much more pervasive than the facts.”

More on this here.

Things to remember as you volunteer or conduct research in a developing country this summer

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Rafia Zakaria, on Al Jazeera America, writes:

My friend Jack likes to tell his favorite story about a summer he spent volunteering in Colombia. He recounts that story anytime he’s handed the opportunity, at parties, lunch meetings and airports. He highlights varying facets of the story on different occasions — the snake he found in his tent, his camaraderie with the locals and his skills at haggling. The message to his audience is clear: I chose hardship and survived it.

If designer clothes and fancy cars signal material status, his story of a deliberate embrace of poverty and its discomforts signals superiority of character. As summer looms, many Americans — college students, retirees and others who stand at the cusp of life changes — will make similar choices in search of transformational experiences. An industry exists to make these easier to make: the voluntourism business.

As admirably altruistic as it sounds, the problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs.

Zakaria rightly adds that:

Despite its flaws, the educational aspect of voluntourism’s cross-cultural exchange must be saved, made better instead of being rejected completely.

As a volunteer or an academic researcher this summer, here are a few things you can do out of respect for the people you work with (especially if you fit standard definitions of “expat”). These points might seem obvious, but even seasoned professionals need a reminder every now and then.

  • Be respectful: I am often shocked at how some otherwise reasonable academics and college students acquire an aura of arrogant omnipotence the second they land in a developing country. Being accorded high status on account of foreignness can do real damage, it turns out. Do not feed off of this. Maintain a level head, and respect those that you deal with. It is for your own good. You will never be able to completely transform the societies you work in, or study. Be humble. Think incremental change. Remember that your presence is temporary. Do not exploit the goodwill of your hosts.
  • Work with the grain: Do not seek to disrupt the way people do things. You can offer advice and introduce people in the villages you visit to new ideas. But do not imagine yourself to be the great change agent. Because you are not. Sustainable change must be anchored within local power dynamics. Do not create parallel systems. I reiterate, whatever change you introduce must be anchored in existing systems. That is the only way the change will be incentive-compatible with the interests of those who hold the power to completely sabotage everything you do. You will most certainly fail if you ignore this reality.

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    This is not cool

  • Keep a diary: You will be in a lot of situations in which you can’t say exactly what you think (and shouldn’t). So keep a diary, and have it be the place where you jot down your naive and disrespectful random thoughts (we all have these thoughts). Review these diary entries once in a while. See if your entries change as you get to know your hosts better. If they don’t, find out what’s missing.
  • Lastly, do not plaster your social media profile wall-to-wall with images of anonymous people in various states of desperation. Nothing says that you are a jerk like having images of anonymous kids with torn clothes milling around you on your Facebook page. Whatever images you post, the world will know whether these were your real friends or just props to advertise to the world that you went to Nicaragua or Namibia. Do not post pictures of people whose names you don’t know, or of children whose parents did not give you permission to do so. Please, do not be that person.

Also, do not forget to learn. Learn and learn some more. And share with your hosts as much as you can.