| The range of cyberactivities is
coming to resemble the computer supermarket of the North. Brazil's
largest bank offers electronic banking; Mexco's largest private
university is pioneering a virtual university; a Venezuelan
e-zine points readers to web sites devoted to Hillary Clinton's
hair. And like up north, computer-culture personalities have
captured the popular imagination; the Latin American journeys
of Bill Gates make for front page headlines throughout the region.
But aside from cyberscoops and technological prowess, what does
the Internet have to offer in the way of cultural and politics?
Does it differ from radio, television, public-access cable television,
video and all the other technological innovations touted as
great equalizers and promoters of democracy? Is there anything
really different going on now?
While RCP prides itself on its computer stations - cabinas
publicas - that make the Internet available to those without
computers at home, "available" is a relative concept in a country
where only 20% of the population is adequately employed and
the cost of a basic basket of consumer goods exceeds the average
worker's salary. According to a preliminary study of the RCP
conducted by University of Lima sociologist Javier Diaz-Albertini,
the average individual member is male, university-educated,
28 years old and resides in a high-income district of Lima.
The Internet should be seen as a tool - no more, no less, says
Scott Robinson, an anthropologist who coordinates Mexico's Rural
Information Network on the non-profit LaNeta network. Robinson
is less concerned about the number of individual users in the
region than the number of barriers that appear when information
and databases become products in nations that never developed
a culture of freedom of information. And as Soriano somewhat
reluctantly admits, perhaps it is time to start talking about
"two Internets." The current one, he conjectures, with all the
wonderful, full-graphic and video applications may be confined
to North-South communication for the elites of the region, while
there may also be a South-South Internet of lower quality connecting
Latin American countries to one another.
"We should not simply abandon this technology because it is
unlikely that all the people will have direct access to it,"
says Carlos Afonso of the network of the Brazilian Institute
of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), a progressive think
tank and umbrella organization based in Rio de Janeiro. The
fact is that popular organizations can use the medium and are
using it as a powerful instrument for democratization of information
and exchange of common plans, policies and strategies. Until
mid-1994, Internet access in Brazil was limited to a select
portion of the academic community. The only organization providing
services outside academia was AlterNex, the network of IBASE.
The country now has the most extensive regulation of the Internet;
phone companies are prohibited from providing access services
to end users and the Brazilian government subsidizes the development
of the Internet backbone structure.
Just as in the United States, the Internet in Latin America
is shifting from a primarily academic-based model with its origins
in departments of engineering and computer science, to a commercial
model. In the United States the process took 20 years; in Latin
America it has happened much more rapidly and in the context
of privatization and deregulation of national telephone companies,
and the specter of a handful of corporations carving out global
markets.
One of the first countries in the region to experiment with
the Internet was Mexico, where efforts to connect networks at
the National Autonomous University in Mexico City (UNAM) and
the private Technological Institute of Monterrey (ITESM or Monterrey
Tec) began over a decade ago. In 1985 the computer science department
at the University of Chile began experimenting with UUCP (UNIX-to-
UNIX copy program, an early technology that uses ordinary modems
and phone lines to handle e-mail and network news), and in 1987
Chile became the first Latin American nation, followed by Argentina,
to enter the UUCP network with access to e-mail and USENET.
(Among the factors contributing to the early development of
the Internet in Argentina and Uruguay was the return of political
exiles who had been teaching and researching at U.S. and European
universities.) Chile's two competing academic networks are now
commercial.
To a great extent, the development of the progressive movement
of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Latin America is
a product of the development of the "other Internet," the one
without the glitz. Internet connections made an increasing number
of alliances possible across borders. Alliances on environmental,
human rights, labor and other issues have been facilitated by
the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a global
network, comprised of 20 member networks in 135 countries, including
the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) which operates
PeaceNet, EcoNet, ConflictNet, LaborNet and WomensNet in the
United States. Two of the earliest activist networks in Latin
America were IBASE AlterNex and Nicarao, the electronic mail
node established by APC in Nicaragua in 1985 in response to
the U.S. hostility to the Sandinista government.
The campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in the early 1990s created alliances among organizations
in the United States, Mexico and Canada, many of which shared
communication via APC networks. Those networks, along with academic
newsgroups, mobilized almost immediately after the January 1994
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, and again in February 1995, in
the wake of increased militarization. More recently, activists
began laying the foundation for an Intercontinental "Network
of Alternative Communication" (RICA in Spanish) as a way to
consolidate already existing social communications networks
and to share organizing strategies.
Another Internet-based effort to bypass traditional media
is Pulsar, a Quito-based project that functions as a low-budget,
grassroots news agency for community radio stations throughout
Latin America. Financed in part by the Canadian government's
international-education fund, Pulsar serves as an alternative
wire service for community radio stations, effectively bypassing
the traditional wire services whose services are too expensive
and whose stories reflect a heavy U.S. or European bias. Using
the Internet, Pulsar staff gather stories from newspapers such
as La Jornada in Mexico or La Republica in Lima, rewrite the
news in "broadcast" format, and distribute the newscasts by
e-mail. The project is establishing a network of correspondents
who will help pool information, and plans call for an eventual
exchange of stories among community radio stations throughout
the region.
Perhaps the most important role of the Internet to grassroots
organizations involves the simplest technology--the use of e-mail--not
only to mobilize around human rights and environmental emergencies,
but to cut costs. "I can't conceive of any other way of doing
our work," explains Ernesto Morales, who directs the Mexico
City office of the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. In addition
to daily correspondence, the Commission is mandated by the United
Nations to prepare four quarterly reports a year in English
and Spanish which are distributed through e-mail.
Although the Commission's offices in Canada, Mexico, Costa
Rica and Spain have become dependent on the Internet, that's
not yet the case in Guatemala, where traditionally military
officials have held high positions in the state-run phone company.
Telephone service is now privatized, but Guatemalans have become
accustomed to assuming that telephone conversations are tapped.
As Morales explains, both "a culture of terror," as well as
technological backlog have to be overcome.
Another concern to activists and NGOs is the growing body
of "cyberwar" and "netwar" literature pioneered by Rand Corporation
analyst David Ronfeldt, who along with David Arquilla of the
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, coined
the terms in a 1993 article "CyberWar is Coming!" In 1993, Ronfeldt
was thinking along the lines of a potential threat from an updated
version of the Mongol hordes that would upset the etablished
hierarchy of institutions. He predicted that communication would
be increasing organizing "into cross-border networks and coalitions,
identifying more with the development of civil society (even
global civil society) than with nation-states, and using advanced
information and communictions technologies to strengthen their
activities." By 1995 Ronfeldt was characterizing the Zapatista
activists as highly successful in limiting the government's
maneuverability, and warning that "the country that produced
the prototype social revolution of the 20th century may now
be giving rise to the prototype social netwar of the 21st century."
When the cabinas publicas finally arrived in Cuzco last summer,
they were installed with great ceremony by local and university
officials at the University of San Antonio Abad. Soon after,
RCP's homepage began appearing in Quechua, as well as Spanish
and English. Soriano insists that the Internet must reflect
local language and culture and not just be a window for Peruvians
to view the wonders of the United States. To finance the growth
of the Internet and projects deemed not commercially viable,
RCP has begun a series of joint ventures with commercial businesses,
leading to charges that the non-profit consortium is trying
to dominate the Internet in Peru.
Since its founding, RCP has battled with the various incarnations
of the Peruvian phone company as well as with government officials
suspicious of an independent communications network that has
an obvious appeal to human rights and other NGOs. Soriano insists
that the private telephone monopoly, Telefonica del Peru has
deliberately stonewalled on the installation of infrastructure
in the provinces and charged steep prices for long-distance
services to cover the inflated price at which it purchased the
public telephone company. Since purcasing the state-owned service
in 1993, Telefonica enjoys a five-year monopoly that Soriano
describes as a modern-day version of the Conquest. (Telefonica's
majority owner is Telefonica de Espana, whose international
division is very active in Latin America, with a stake in the
telephone companies of Agentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia,
and Puerto Rico as well as Peru.)
The Internet itself, of course, is in transition. Existing
main data pipes of the Internet backbone are not paying for
themselves, and veteran net watchers like Carlos Afonso foresee
an eventual dual pricing scheme, classifying services into lower
and higher priority in terms of real-time data transfer. In
the United States, the trend is toward increasing specialization
of the Internet, with service providers turning into information
providers and purchasing bulk modem time from phone companies,
or from firms that buy lines in bulk from phone companies.
That trend has not yet begun in Latin America, but it will.
In the meantime, Internet watchers in the region would do well
to see that the growing gap that Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce
Echenique describes as the fundamental challenge for the 21st
century - the gap between "the slow" and "the connected" - does
not grow any bigger than it already is.
A version of this article appeared in the November/December
1996 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas.
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