Senator María Fernanda Cabal replicated the strategy that almost led Rodolfo Hernández to the Presidency: using WhatsApp groups with messages geolocated by cities and departments that work like pyramids to viralize their messages on networks.
The #SoyCabal and #SoyOpositor groups bring together 25,000 people in dozens of chats in which they share the congresswoman’s social media posts and her reactions to sensitive issues on the national agenda such as the Truth Commission, the Church and tax reform .
Cabal has content every week. The first of the month arrived this Thursday inviting a virtual forum on the plebiscite in Chile, “a Constituent towards the abyss”, as read in the description that sought to address the supposed risks of that process for the rest of Latin America.
Two days earlier, she used that same platform to broadcast a video inviting Catholics to “join in prayer” against the decision of the El Dorado airport in Bogotá to remove the oratory because that determination, the senator believes, “is another strategy of persecution and annulment ”against the Church like those that this institution has experienced in Nicaragua and China.
In that conversation alone, number three among Cabal followers who live in Bogotá, the message is seen by 445 people: a guaranteed audience of citizens who identify with the right.
The chains began in the legislative campaign and worked so well for him that he was one of the most voted in the country, with 196,865 tags marked with his name, and the second for the Democratic Center behind Miguel Uribe Turbay (223,167). That success and the goal of being the first female president of Colombia made the platforms continue to operate.
Los chats they have 25,000 members, new users appear every day and are managed by communicators who send information and engineers who monitor the flow of data. Although the conversations are distributed according to the capitals, in these there are Colombians who live in the United States, Spain, Germany or Austria, to mention a few countries.
What moves around ends up being a trend on networks such as the message against the report of the alleged “entrapment” of former guerrilla Jesús Santrich published by the Truth Commission. What’s more: his surname hits Twitter and Facebook every week. That viralization –and digitization– of his name is connected to the renewed story of the Democratic Center in networks to reach new audiences: young adults and people of low strata.
2023: in the crosshairs of the party
The new face of the networks is an attempt by the party to target other audiences with a view to the 2023 regional elections. The objective is clear: to capture audiences and show that the community, they say from within, is not just for uncles and grandparents.
The directive outlines the speeches (for example, the arguments against the tax reform) so that the militants join their style. However, the “Soy Cabal” strategy was outlined only by the senator’s team.
“We are achieving a reach in young people that we did not have in our monitoring. The networks show us that we also reached strata other than 6, 5 and 4, which is where we had been strongest,” said a person close to the process. The number of young people who follow the community has grown by 60% due to the new strategy.
The change in communications also seeks to separate the image of former President Álvaro Uribe from that of the rest of the party; yes, without ceasing to fully exploit the Uribe factor because he is the militant with the most power on the networks. It is more: the former president follows behind the scenes of everything that happens in the community.
Technology changed the means of political communication. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro came to the Presidency of Brazil without much street, but with a whole system of content creation to forward through WhatsApp groups and posts to go viral on Facebook.
The Colombia case showed the power of cyber conversations with Rodolfo Hernández’s second place in the elections and even Gustavo Petro used those tools with the warehouses of the Pact. Will the WhatsApp strategy work for María Fernanda Cabal? There are four years of messages left to prove it.