Guatemalan Fears A Tweet Will Make Him A
Jailbird
By Juan Carlos Llorca
Guatemala (AP) - Jean Anleu was so fed up
with corruption in his country that he
decided to vent on the Internet, sending a
96-character message on the
social-networking site Twitter. That message
has now earned him a potential five-year
prison sentence and the unfortunate
distinction of becoming one of the first
people in the world to be arrested for a
tweet.
Writing under his Internet alias "jeanfer,"
Anleu urged depositors to pull their money
from Guatemala's rural development bank,
whose management has been challenged in a
political scandal: "First concrete action
should be take cash out of Banrural and
bankrupt the bank of the corrupt."
These words illegally undermined public
trust in Guatemala's banking system,
according to prosecutor Genaro Pacheco.
Authorities proved Anleu sent the message by
searching his Guatemala City home, and then
put him in prison with kidnappers,
extortionists and other dangerous criminals
for a day and a half before letting him out
on bail.
Anleu's lawyer, Jose Toledo, believes the
government wants to make an example of him.
"Clearly, the message was: Watch out, any of
you guys that want to post messages, this
can happen to you. ... It was a dissuasive
measure," Toledo said.
Guatemala, whose democracy is still emerging
from a genocidal civil war, isn't the only
government concerned about the potential of
lightning-fast tweets to spread stinging
words.
More recently, Iran has shown its
determination to clamp down on huge protests
over its disputed presidential election,
banning firsthand reporting by international
journalists and blocking access inside the
country to Web sites such as Twitter and
Facebook as well as many sites linked to the
political opposition. Text messaging has
been blacked out and cell phone service in
Tehran is frequently down.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested in
Iran, many of them for Internet activity,
estimates Hadi Ghaemi, director of the New
York-based International Campaign for Human
Rights in Iran.
"I can't say I know of a specific case of
tweeting," said Ghaemi, noting that Iran's
government has not yet filed charges.
"Evidence may be a tweet or something but
we're just not going to know until these
trials are under way."
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone declined to
comment on the Anleu case or say whether he
knows of other arrests involving tweeting.
China and Vietnam are two other countries
that already "worry a lot about text
messaging and its potential to spread rumors
and gather crowds. Now they have another
venue to watch — another place where people
can communicate quickly, in ways that a
government might fear," said Jonathan
Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman
Center for Internet & Society.
For Anleu — a geeky computer enthusiast
whose passions include playing chess and
reading Czech author Franz Kafka — life has
taken on some disturbing parallels to
Kafka's "The Trial," whose protagonist
struggles to defend himself against the
power of the state.
"I fear I'm being watched and scrutinized in
everything I say and do," said Anleu, who
walks around with an iPhone to constantly
tweet and a BlackBerry loaded with e-books.
"The fear makes me want to avoid saying what
I think, even about the most mundane topics,
and saying where I am, where I'm going —
like you would normally do on Twitter."
Pacheco said prosecutors plan to charge
Anleu in July under a 2008 law that provides
for five years in prison and a $6,200 fine
for spreading false information that
undermines the public's trust in a financial
institution.
But if the government hoped to silence
criticism, it appears to have had the
opposite effect. As news of Anleu's arrest
spread through the Twitter community,
thousands of others started "re-tweeting"
his message, bringing Guatemala's government
still more unwanted publicity.
About half of his $6,200 bail was donated by
Twitterers, who sent money via PayPal from
19 countries. The other 50 percent was lent
to him by one of the companies he works for
as a business technology consultant.
And Anleu's social network has grown to more
than 1,600 followers, up from about 175 who
before his arrest mostly shared tweets about
"computers and other geeky stuff," he says.
Some call this phenomenon the "Streisand
effect," a term coined by Techdirt Inc.
chief executive Mike Masnick on his popular
technology blog after the actress Barbra
Streisand sued in 2003 to remove satellite
photos of her estate in Malibu, Calif. The
case just drove more attention to the photos
and made them more widely accessible.
The Internet has become a potent organizing
tool for opponents of Guatemala's president,
Alvaro Colom. In a videotaped message from a
lawyer, Colom was accused of helping drug
cartels launder money through Banrural. The
lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, said in the
message that if he was killed, it would be
because Colom ordered it. Rosenberg was shot
dead by unknown assailants days after making
the video.
DVDs of the tape were distributed at his
funeral, and Colom opponents quickly put the
video up on YouTube. Many Guatemalans —
including Anleu — responded with outrage on
social networks, encouraging huge protest
marches.
Colom, the first leftist president since a
CIA-orchestrated coup overthrew Jacobo
Arbenz in 1954, said the accusations are
part of an elaborate plot to destabilize the
country. His foreign minister suggested the
entire scandal might be staged by organized
crime groups who might have forced Rosenberg
to tape the message under threats.
The upheaval since then is arguably the
first truly online phenomenon in this
country where Internet is still far beyond
the reach of the majority of the population.
And because most poorer Guatemalans who
support Colom have little chance of logging
on, Colom's supporters are vastly
outnumbered. The Facebook group "Guatemalans
united ask for the resignation of Alvaro
Colom" has 41,000 members, about a third of
Facebook's reported Guatemalan population,
while "Solidarity with Alvaro Colom" has
fewer than 150 this week.
Anleu, however, is trying to keep his tweets
more restrained and less political.
His lawyer hopes this will all blow over and
the trial, set for November, will never
happen.
"The prosecutors will eventually see their
mistake, that they got the wrong person,
someone innocent," Toledo said.
Even so, Anleu's legal bills will run close
to $10,000 by year's end — a tough blow for
a man who volunteers in his spare time to
bring open-source software and training to
schools in poor neighborhoods.
"When this is over, I want to travel, I want
to see the world ... sit in a cafe in
Budapest or Prague," that Kafka might have
frequented a century ago, Anleu said. First,
he said, "comes paying all these bills."
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