MARANKIARI BAJO, Peru –– Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.
Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.
It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people."
Through grants from a Lima-based nonprofit organization, the Canadian government and the local telephone company, the computer came last October along with a portable generator, a satellite dish and a big screen monitor for video conferencing for high school education. Since Rosas and five other tribal leaders received eight weeks of computer training, they have built an Ashaninka Web site filled with their folklore (www.rcp.net.pe/ashaninka). E-commerce has boosted tribal revenue 10 percent as they have used the Net to sell organically grown oranges in Lima, 250 miles to the east.
The Ashaninka represent one extraordinary example of a nascent Internet phenomenon in Latin America, the region telecommunication analysts call the fastest growing Net market in the world. Experts estimate that 13 million to 16 million Latin Americans are now online. Although representing only 3 to 4 percent of the region's 500 million people, compared with more than 50 percent in the United States, the user rate in Latin America is more than doubling each year. In the region's most prosperous countries, it is doubling every four to six months.
The unprecedented spread of the Net here stems largely from an explosion of Internet companies and content aimed at affluent residents of Latin America's megacities, something analysts say has helped put Spanish in the running as the second language of the Internet after English. But the region's technological leap is also viewed as an ideal case study for the power of the Internet to act as an economic equalizer in the developing world.
The average Internet user in Latin America is still white, male, urban, university educated and rich or upper middle class. But over the past two years, a movement has gained significant momentum to put a dent in what has been called Latin America's "digital apartheid." In an effort to keep the Internet from broadening the gap between Latin America's classes--already the widest in the world--progressive governments, activists and nonprofit organizations have seized on the technology to reach out to the poor and the young.
Unlike more entertainment-driven technologies such as television and even Nintendo game systems--which are commonplace in Latin American shantytowns but have done little to boost people out of poverty--greater hopes are being put in the educational and informative powers of the Internet.
In Argentina, the government launched a $1 billion program this year to offer personal computer loans to people who cannot afford conventional credit. In Chile, the government finished an ambitious plan to wire all 1,263 public high schools to the Internet. Half of all grammar schools also have been wired, opening the Net to students of all economic levels. In Brazil, Latin America's most populous country and home to half its Internet users, nonprofit organizations have introduced computer courses and Internet connections to hundreds of slums.
At the same time, the advent of companies offering free Internet access to Latin Americans has made it more accessible than ever.
"We cannot make the same mistake twice, allowing the new economy to become just as unequal and unjust as the old economy in Latin America," said Dante Caputo, Argentina's technology secretary. "We have got to do everything in our power to make sure that the poor have access to the Internet. It is our best chance to begin to achieve some kind of social and economic justice here."
Without question, massive barriers exist. Analysts worry that poor infrastructure, especially in rural areas, will derail attempts to fight poverty. Indeed, expensive, Internet-ready computers were shipped to at least one rural school in Argentina last year that still lacked electricity. Also, many poor people without the reading and writing skills necessary to surf the Net seem doomed to fall between the cracks.
But the effort is being made, especially among the young. Even Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."
Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.
"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible."
The efforts also have been directed at people like Max Freitas, 16. Freitas, who lives in Rio de Janeiro's Mangueira shantytown, one of Latin America's largest, had never seen a computer until two years ago. After learning basic computer skills at a corporate-sponsored course, he sharpened them through the Committee to Democratize Information Technology, a nongovernmental organization that introduced him to the Internet. His mother, a cook, and father, who is unemployed, purchased a computer, a shaky amalgam of used parts, for roughly $600, with financial help from relatives.
"I never thought I'd be able to use a computer because that was something completely outside my reality," said Freitas, who says he wants to pursue a career in computers. "Now I do research on the Net. I read the newspapers. I keep in touch with friends."
Freitas is in the minority of Latin American households with computers. According to the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, there are 0.2 personal computers per household in Latin America, compared with 1.6 in the United States. But increasingly, Latin Americans find they do not need their own computer to access the Web. More and more, computers are available in schools or community centers, or they can be rented by the hour in cybercafes for as little as $1 to $3 an hour in some countries. In Brazil, where roughly 18 million cellular phones are in use, analysts predict that wireless Internet services will become a cheaper alternative to computer-based use.
The struggle to wire the poor, while still far behind similar attempts in the United States, has gained ground as the cost of Internet access has tumbled. In Brazil, furious market competition and the devaluation of Brazil's currency have brought Internet rates down from $40 a month two years ago to roughly $10 today. In Chile, government regulations in 1999 forced rates down by 70 percent, with the average cost for 20 hours falling from $55 to $15.
In the past year, some companies have begun to offer free Internet access. They are aiming, analysts said, for the sons and daughters of wealthy families and the advertisers who want to reach them. But the side effect is that people like Freitas can get free access, too.
Between December 1999 and February of this year, after Brazilian companies began to offer free access, the number of Internet users jumped by 1.2 million people.
Matinas Suzuki, director of content at Internet Gratis, said his six-month-old company had projected that it would have 400,000 registered clients by April. That number was reached in two weeks. Today an estimated 2 million people regularly access the Internet via his site.
"These are people who can get to a computer, but can't afford to pay $20 a month in fees," Suzuki said.
This has happened as Latin Americans go online at a faster rate than any other people on the globe. That growth, and increasing use of the Net by Hispanics in the United States, has created a boom in Spanish-language portals and content on the Web. Content in Portuguese, the language of giant Brazil, is also soaring. Heavy hitters such as America Online Inc. have plunged into the region despite high risks such as its historically wild economic ups and downs.
America Online Latin America Inc. launched in Brazil in November and plans to expand into Mexico and Argentina later this year with a $374 million public offering. Many Latin American operations are bleeding money as they try to get the formula right. AOL Latin America lost $51 million in nine months ending March 31, the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
But in a region where high taxes, import duties and difficulty finding some goods produced abroad have made online shopping particularly attractive, e-commerce is booming as the Internet changes everything from politics to tax filing. Brazilian consumers, who purchased $198 million in goods via the Internet two years ago, are expected to spend $900 million through the Web this year.
In Buenos Aires, during this year's mayoral campaign one candidate sent out his campaign message on 200,000 CD-ROMs. In Chile, 30 percent of taxpayers filed electronically in April, a 500 percent increase from 1999.
Noting Latin America's history of economic inequality, analysts cautioned that it is the larger and more economically powerful countries in the region that are racking up new users.
"If you look at distribution, more than 80 percent of Latin America's Internet users are in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico," said Jose Luiz Rossi, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Sao Paulo. "Then you get to Chile, and by then, it becomes small stuff."
Which is more reason why Rosas, head of the Ashaninka village in Peru, is thankful.
While the tribe's story offers hope--after taking computer training classes, one of its young leaders won admission to a university in Lima--it is also a cautionary tale of how difficult expansion of the Internet to the poor may prove to be. Although most of the tribe, especially the young, speaks fluent Spanish, many of the village's 1,000 residents, including almost all middle-aged women, cannot read or write, an all too common problem in the poorest Latin American countries.
For most uneducated adults in the village, the computer in Rosas's hut is still outside their grasp. "I guess we are a lost generation already," said Pilar Jacinto Santos, 43, who is pushing her three daughters to learn to use the computer although she won't go near it herself. "But if my prayers are answered, my children won't be."
Buckley reported from Rio de Janeiro. Researcher Robert Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
Latin America Goes Online
The Latin American Internet market is growing faster than that of any other world region, even outdoing Asia in its growth rate.
Estimated numbers of Internet users in early 2000
Brazil 6.9 million
Mexico 2.4
Argentina 0.9
Chile 0.6
Colombia 0.6
Peru 0.4
Venezuela 0.4
For comparison:
U.S.: 111 million
Japan: 18 million
SOURCES: Worldwatch Institute, based on Network Wizards, Internet Software Consortium, International Telecommunications Union
