A senior executive at Twitter Latin America spent years working for right-wing Mexican politicians, including the notoriously corrupt Felipe Calderón. During his tenure as president, Calderón reportedly operated death squads, coordinated with drug cartels, and ordered the assassination of journalists. He even publicly called for an “armed rebellion” to overthrow the country’s current, democratically elected leader.
Twitter has claimed the administrator’s lengthy political history has no influence over his work at the social media giant. But amid a wave of social media censorship that has targeted left-wing users, many Mexicans are crying foul.
As US Big Tech corporations are becoming more brazen in their direct interference in countries’ political affairs, the Mexican government has initiated an international campaign to resist social media censorship.
When US President Donald Trump was suspended by Twitter in January, Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador condemned the move as a dangerous precedent.
“Yes, social media should not be used to incite violence and all of that, but that cannot be a reason to suspend freedom of expression; that should not be used as an excuse,” López Obrador said in a
press conference on January 14. “How can a company bestow upon itself omnipotent, absolute power, like some type of Spanish Inquisition on the right to free expression?”
Known popularly as AMLO, López Obrador has spoken out repeatedly and forcefully against social media censorship, recognizing that it targets not only right-wing supporters of Trump, but also his own progressive followers.
Officials in AMLO’s administration have contacted governments in the European Union, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to organize a joint action against internet censorship. “I can tell you that, in the first G20 meeting we have, there will be a proposal on this issue,” AMLO said.
In the weeks following Twitter’s censorship of Trump, the company intensified its crackdown on left-wing Mexican activists. A group of prominent supporters of López Obrador were suspended in coordinated fashion, suggesting they were being targeted not for violating any terms of use on the website, but because of their politics.
Mexicans protested that the pro-AMLO influencers were banned just days after a right-wing Mexican celebrity took to Twitter to call for López Obrador to be assassinated, and faced no punishment.
On January 18, Mexican social media influencer
@Joe_Trouble, who has nearly 2 million Twitter followers, tweeted, “On Obrador, we need to use the same vaccine that they used against Kennedy” — an obvious call for Mexico’s left-wing president to be shot in the head. But Twitter did not suspend @Joe_Trouble, whose account is verified with a blue check mark; all the company did was delete his tweet.
Just three days later, however, Twitter suspended the accounts of numerous big-name AMLO supporters, without providing any explanation for their banishment.
The purge of Mexican leftists was only the latest example of
Silicon Valley corporations silencing activists from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iran, China, Russia, and other countries that have been targeted by the US government.
Many Mexicans, including President López Obrador himself, placed the blame firmly on Twitter’s company staff. In a morning
press briefing on January 20, AMLO pointed to a top executive with a long record of work with conservative Mexican politicians, including the progressive president’s most powerful rival.
The operative’s name is Hugo Rodríguez Nicolat. Before he was hired as Twitter Latin America’s current director of public policy, Rodríguez worked directly for Mexico’s right-wing National Action Party (PAN), filling top roles in both the party and the administration of former President Felipe Calderón.
Mexican opposition politicians and even some major Spanish-language
media outlets falsely claimed that AMLO’s statements about Rodríguez were incorrect, by misrepresenting his words. But the Twitter executive boasts of his work for the PAN on his publicly available
LinkedIn profile.
Rodríguez is not the only Twitter executive with clear political ties. In 2019, it was exposed that Twitter’s top Middle East editor was also working with the
UK Army’s psychological operations (psyops) unit, which admits to waging “information warfare.”
The revelation that one of Spanish-language Twitter’s most senior administrators worked for a former right-wing Mexican leader credibly accused of widespread corruption and repression set off a political firestorm inside the country.
Twitter is one of Mexico’s most popular social media platforms. Most major politicians are active on the site, as is a vast community of journalists and communicators who wield considerable influence on Mexican politics.
The vast majority of
mainstream media outlets in Mexico are aggressively anti-AMLO, and openly biased against his left-wing Fourth Transformation (4T) movement. This has made social networks like Twitter an alternative base for pro-AMLO perspectives that are almost entirely absent in mainstream media.
AMLO’s Twitter support base is so substantial that his supporters were able to get hashtags #TwitterCensura (Twitter censors) and #TwitterEsPanista (Twitter is a PAN supporter) to trend on the website in Mexico.
As the controversy grew, Twitter suspended the accounts of more prominent AMLO supporters, whose list of followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The suspensions took place within minutes of one another, pouring fuel on the fire, and confirming the allegations of political bias in the minds of AMLO’s online base.
Faced with a mounting scandal, Twitter issued a
vague statement denying the involvement of specific individuals – an oblique reference to Hugo Rodríguez Nicolat – in policy decisions and suspensions.
While Rodríguez and Twitter have publicly insisted that his political history does not affect his work at the company, The Grayzone has uncovered examples of Rodríguez using his influential position to help amplify US-backed coup attempts in both Venezuela and Nicaragua, offering Twitter Latin America’s massive platform to US-sponsored right-wing regime-change activists.
