LATIN AMERICA-COMMUNICATIONS: Ineternet – From Drip to Flood

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Apr 21 1996 (IPS) - What began as a drip in Brazil and Mexico is turning into a flood: today, the ranks of users and providers of informatics networks in Latin America are growing by leaps and bounds.

Academics and some audacious guerrilla fighters, such as the rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salvador, were the region’s only cybernauts 10 years ago.

But with the expansion of Internet today, especially in Brazil and Mexico, the number of users is mushrooming.

An investigation carried out by IPS in 12 Latin American countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela – indicates a total of around one million Internet users. And there are more than 140 providers, including government ministries and national and transnational companies.

Users, including newspapers, magazines, governments, political parties, non-governmental organisations, human rights committees, former presidents, artists and thousands of anonymous individuals, are constantly opening new pages in the network and plying its spaces of video, sound and texts.

No communications media or consumer electronic technology has grown so rapidly in Latin America or other regions as this network of networks – not even the fax machine or the personal computer.

From Mexico, where estimates point to some 300,000 Internet users – a figure three times higher than a year ago – the integration of informatics networks among universities and governments was boosted by the Latin American Institute of Transnational Studies from 1986 to 1992.

In Chile the UCP was born in 1985. UCP is a network made up of local universities which promote electronic mail and information- sharing.

Cybernetic routes were also used over the past decade by groups such as the FMLN, which amid the din of civil war found that the this was the surest and safest way to communicate, said a former researcher with the Autonomous University of Mexico, who acted as a consultant to the FMLN.

The Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico, a movement whose supporters send messages through the Internet to disseminate the group’s positions, have followed in the tracks of the FMLN but on a wider, international scale.

Unlike 10 years ago, when computers linked up through complicated and slow codes and processes, Internet users enjoy programmes designed to “fly” through cyberspace. They can watch a video, listen to or transmit an audio broadcast, buy, learn – and, of course, communicate.

Although it is a global network, Internet users in Latin America find that a large part of the content is local, with a narrow focus. Cat breeders and knitting clubs now have an international voice.

All Latin American governments have pages on the Internet. Messages on the national economy, tourism and culture circulate in those cybernetic space. Some of these were opened from the United States – by the Bolivian, Guatemalan and Honduran governments, for example.

Unofficial estimates gathered by IPS correspondents indicate that around 70 percent of the Internet users in the 12 countries in question are concentrated in Brazil and Mexico. The other 30 percent are found in descending order in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia.

Internet reached some countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, well over a year ago. But it is a new phenomenon in other areas.

In Bolivia, where there are an estimated 100 users, the network began to operate five months ago. It has been functioning in Colombia for six months, three in Guatemala and two in Honduras.

Rapid growth of the network — up by 600 percent in Chile in 1995 — has encouraged hundreds of large and small companies to advertise their products and services. In Brazil, for example, the number of commercial users grew 23 percent in February.

The expansion has been fast and chaotic. Local and transnational telephone companies, through whose lines the service flows, are beginning to seek their share of the pie.

In Peru, the communications firm acquired by Spain’s state- owned telephone company has announced that it will offer direct connections to Internet without the intervention of providers. And similar things are occurring in other countries.

Overtaken by the explosive growth of the network, no government in the region has yet attempted to come up with legislation on the question – with the exception of Cuba.

Experts say that censoring Internet would be impossible. Thus it will be up to parents and teachers to use special systems to block access to spaces dedicated, for example, to pornography.