Mikel Arriola Penalosa He has the biggest project of his professional career ahead of him. The way it solves it will impact the relationships and interactions of the crowds gathered by professional soccer in Mexico and, what is worse, its results may lead to the export of the model to other social interactions. Rest assured that, considering Arriola’s discursive history, his solution proposals will not be the most closely related to the protection of human rights and we will begin with an invasion of privacy and the right to protection of personal data.
The acts of extreme violence recorded during the match between Roosters from Querétaro and Atlas from Guadalajaraon Saturday March 5, 2022, will be the justification for a huge social experiment of surveillance and control in football that will incorporate technological devices for video surveillance, facial recognition and artificial intelligence.
All with the consent of an audience that wants to see blood. What we saw on Saturday is not enough, what follows is the retaliation of a State that has lost control and that will do everything to show that it has something left.
As a society we are hurt by the extreme violence of La Corregidora stadium in Queretaro because stadiums were still supposed to be “neutral” places in our recent history of violence and cruelty. A neutrality that was suddenly broken, but that was still a family meeting space. We identify with the terrified victims and families because “they are like us”, unlike the victims of other forms of violence of extreme cruelty, such as the shooting in San José de Gracia or the recurring massacres of migrants. These victims are not like us: they live in impoverished neighborhoods, in peripheral communities, they are foreigners from the South.
That is why the violence on Saturday will allow punitive excesses and institutional discipline, be it a State or a private corporation. Examples exist, such as the one taking place in the stadium Nemesio Diez of TolucaState of Mexico, where a video surveillance and facial recognition system from the private company Seguritech collects and analyzes the personal biometric data of all stadium attendees since 2017 without the consent of their owners.
Now it will be directly up to Arriola to design preventive and corrective measures, a task tailored to his needs and consistent with a few pages of his resume as a public figure, as a professional politician.
As ephemeral as director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (2016-2018), Arriola led a moral crusade against a couple of resident doctors who were wrong to exhibit the amputated limb of a patient on their social networks. The application of the corrective and punitive norms was enough, but Arriola wanted lynch the doctors also in the media. In the end, as a good politician, Arriola left his post before the courts hit them: the IMSS had to restore wages and recognize that he judged without a gender perspective (Among other arbitrariness of the Arriola justice, a man was also involved in the case, but he was never persecuted).
As a far-right candidate nominated by the PRI to govern Mexico City, Arriola embraced the anti-rights agenda, invoking an electorate against same-sex marriage, in favor of a traditional family concept, and against the legal interruption of pregnancy and decriminalization of marijuana.
And for a few weeks, as a representative of the MX LeagueArriola promotes a system of signing the fans who attend the matches of the Mexican National Team, considering them all as alleged future offenders of making the prohibited cry of “Puto!”.
The solution of Arriola to create an environment without homophobic shouting was to sign all the amateursrequiring a series of personal data that allow us to accurately identify people and also deliver personalized advertising, since the privacy notice of the MX League continues to consider registration for market actions. Win-win, they say.
Arriola is not the right person for the task, but he will have to lead her in a moment of social shock that will allow her to apply almost anything. Darker times are ahead.
Editor of El Economista online
Economy
Journalist. Since 2010 he edits the digital version of El Economista in Mexico City. Master in Transparency and Protection of Personal Data from the University of Guadalajara. He has a specialization in telecommunications and information technology law. His personal blog is Economicon.