The elections are a circus and Neto Bran is the clown: Affective Publics in Guatemala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 1 July 2023, a video of a semi-naked man lying on a couch luxuriously smoking a large cigar and getting three crucifixes tattooed on his neck appeared on Instagram and TikTok. Set to the song “Hoy cobré” (Today I got paid) by Puerto Rican reggaetonero Bad Bunny, it has a strong narco-aesthetic vibe. It produced substantial engagement on social media, generating thousands of likes, hundreds of shares, and dozens of supportive, critical, and mocking comments. Perhaps surprisingly, the man in the video is not a popular rapper or narcocorrido artist, but 44-year-old Ernest Steve Bran Montenegro, more commonly known as Neto Bran, who had just won a third term as the mayor of Guatemala’s second most populous city, Mixco. This article seeks to provide a critical semiological and conjunctural analysis of the political and campaigning activity of Neto Bran, focusing on the mediatisation of his work as mayor of Mixco and on the building of affective publics. Our analysis draws attention to how the different archetypes – entrepreneur, charro, narco, self-made man, saviour – Bran appropriates and performs centre his “macho-populist” body as a locus of power, and build a counter-public that these same mediatic gestures are designed to bury.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".