Techno Censorship, Alberto Escorcia

Mexico used to be a place of refugees, a place that opened the doors to many people on civil wars, running away from tragedies. Now is a country that is making people flee, that is going through an invisible rising of terror.

There are a number of brave people that have been documenting and denouncing these cases, the reporters of these situations are now harassed, persecuted and the less fortunate, killed. One of them is Alberto Escorcia (LoQueSigue) who has firmly stood up and demonstrated the different actors of this silent war: the military, the government, the economics working against their own people.

Now, with his life threatened, Alberto temporarily resides in Barcelona, and in Barcelona they can't dismiss these issues. So many cases of dead reporters precede him: Regina Martínez in Veracruz, Rubén Espinosa most recently killed in his apartment in Mexico City (also fleeting from Veracruz), and finally Goyo Jiménez a photojournalist not surprisingly also killed in Veracruz.

Silencing by the government has found new ways of censorship through non-traditional media, such as the ones Alberto really knows well. 

Alberto showed three cases that deal with techno censorship at different points in time in Mexico: 

#YaMeCanse: A massive attack on a virtual protest around Ayotzinapa made by "Peñabots" (or paid people with fake twitter accounts: trolls) against activists and social media by distorting reality. Alberto documented this process and through Aristegui News, disseminated this information almost worldwide. 

Alberto divides in three the phases of censorship after 2009 in Mexico: 
1. Ears everywhere: massive espionage in community radio stations, through the telephone... 
2. The second level, raising fake opinions or trends: cases like Andrés Sepúlveda, who admits hacking the Mexican elections.
3. And finally, virtually attacking the most important bloggers or popular people through social media. But that attack does not only reside in the virtual world by bots and trolls. By identifying them physically, they can threaten them over the cell phone, by text messages and in some cases by breaking into their houses to intimidate and truncate their investigations.

The attack of #Andrea Noel who was sexually harassed on the street by someone that took her underwear down and making her fall one sunny afternoon. By analysing the information, Alberto found that the same "bot accounts" that attacked other virtual activist movements were also attacking Andrea, some even with death threats.

The same case of coordinated and financed assault was made towards Father Solalinde a few months ago, this being the last thing Alberto documented before leaving Mexico, when his apartment was broken into and his hard drive stolen.