More affordable computers and an expanding broadband network are two of the factors helping to push Internet use in Latin America, according to a survey conducted by Pyramid Research for Google.
The Miami Herald reports that the recent expansion of Internet users in Latin America has been dramatic.
In 2007, for example, Colombia added 5.4 million Internet users, or about 12% of its population of 45 million -- an 80% increase in the number of Colombia's Internet users that year.
Brazil added 7.4 million Internet users in 2007 (17% growth), Mexico more than 2.2 million (an 11% increase) and Venezuela 1.58 million (38% growth).
Read the full report through the link above.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Chris Kraul reports from Ecuador: Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it.
Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family.
"I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black."
Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.
"Here's the cause," Garrido said, contemplating the dark slime gleaming on the end of the branch.
The contamination at Garrido's farm and hundreds of others in a Rhode Island-sized area here in the Ecuadorean Amazon is the basis of a controversial, long-running civil lawsuit in which a verdict is expected early next year.
On one side are 30,000 mostly peasant farmers like Garrido who say they are living a health and ecological nightmare caused by careless oil drilling and production methods that contaminated their drinking water and spoiled their lush jungle environment.
On the other side is defendant Chevron, the San Ramon, Calif.-based parent company which in 2001 acquired Texaco, which produced oil here from 1972 to 1990, and which the lawsuit claims polluted a vast swath of the Amazon. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up its share of the spills with three years of remediation work and that the Ecuadorean government absolved it of all future responsibility in 1998.
Read more of "Ecuador keeps up oil cleanup fight against Chevron" here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Abel Garrido stands near his oil-polluted pond in Coca, Ecuador. “I’ve lost 30 cows,” Garrido says. “I cut them open and their insides are black.” Chris Kraul / Los Angeles Times
The Christian Science Monitor reports: Bolivia has given U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers three months to leave the country, claiming that agents were stirring up political strife in the deeply divided nation.
This fall, Ecuadoreans voted yes to a new constitution that calls for the closure by next year of one of the most important U.S. operations in the war against drugs.
And for the fourth year in a row, Venezuela was singled out by President Bush -- as was Bolivia for the first time -- for having "failed demonstrably" in anti-drug cooperation.
The U.S. has long had a presence in Latin America to stem the northward drug flow; Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia are the world's largest cocaine producers. The U.S. still boasts strong partnerships with many countries, such as Colombia and Mexico. But in others, particularly those led by leftists who have risen in collective condemnation of Washington, leaders are increasingly severing ties.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
John Kiriakou, now in the private sector, served as a CIA counter-terrorism official from 1998 to 2004. Today, he writes in Los Angeles Times Opinion about how he thinks Iran is making major diplomatic inroads into Latin America, right under Washington's nose. It's amazing, really. Iran, after all, is regarded by most of the world as an outlaw country. Sanctions are in place on much of its military-industrial complex, and international loan guarantees are virtually impossible to come by. The Iranian economy is in tatters. Even while $100-plus oil was enriching most producers in the region, Iran's low-tech, outdated industry was barely profiting. In fact, 6% of the country's gasoline is imported.
Nevertheless, over the last year, Iran has worked diligently to expand relations with a host of Latin American countries, most of which have populist leaders who harbor a strong distrust of the United States and are looking for a powerful friend to help them rebuff Washington's influence.
Read the rest of "Iran's Latin America push" here.
— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
A few weeks ago, 19 Ecuadorean citizens detained on these world-renowned islands were marched onto a plane and sent back to the continent under armed guard. Their crime? Illegal migration, writes Chris Kraul.
So far this year, the government has expelled 1,000 of its citizens from the Galapagos -- a living laboratory of unique animal and plant species -- who were there without residency and work permits. It has also "normalized" 2,000 others, in effect giving most of them a year to leave.
The migrants are attracted not by the tortoises or blue-footed boobies but by the islands' booming economy, which offers plentiful jobs and good pay. Typical wages run 70% higher than on Ecuador's mainland, the public schools are good, and violent crime is nonexistent.
Last year, Ecuador was stung by a United Nations warning that the islands, whose human population has doubled in 10 years to about 30,000, are at risk from overcrowding and mismanaged tourism.
Read more about problems on the paradisaic Galapagos Islands here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Chris Kraul and Patrick J. Mcdonnell report from São Paulo on the growing popularity of Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. "Buoyed by a robust economy and his ability to work with leaders across the ideological spectrum, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has emerged as the chief power broker and mediator in South America.
"Lula's rise has paralleled the decline of U.S. influence in its 'backyard,' analysts say, a result in part of Washington's plummeting global prestige and the Bush administration's unremitting focus on the Middle East.
"A moderate with an unassailable leftist background, Lula has become the point man for healing regional crises such as the current turmoil in Bolivia and the recent escalation of tensions among Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador."
Click here for more about Brazil.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, second from the right, with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa at the meeting in which they talked about regional integration in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Antonio Lacerda / European Pressphoto Agency
As his popularity has surged and his nation's booming economy has lifted thousands from poverty, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has largely refrained from the angry criticism of the United States that can be heard nearly any day from other South American leaders.
Not this time, reports Joshua Partlow for the Washington Post.
Last week, Lula told the U.N. General Assembly that the "boundless greed" of a few should not be shouldered by all, and on Monday, he said emerging economies had done their best to have "good fiscal policy" and "can't be turned into victims of the casino erected by the American economy."
"This crisis belongs to the American bankers, to the European bankers. It doesn't belong to the Brazilian bankers," Lula said Monday. "It's not fair for Latin American, African and Asian countries to pay for the irresponsibility of sectors of the American financial system."
Earlier this week, Chris Kraul reported from Ecuador on why Latin America should worry about the economic crisis in the United States.
Read the rest of the report from the Washington Post here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
After being lectured for 20 years about the superiority of the free market, officials in Latin America see no small irony in the effort to bail out the U.S. banking system, writes Chris Kraul from Ecuador.
Latin America has several reasons to worry about the U.S. economic meltdown. Ecuador, for instance, fears the possible loss of duty-free export markets for its coffee, fish and flowers.
People here are also worried the crisis will cut into the $2 billion in annual remittances sent home by Ecuadoreans living in the U.S., and wonder whether the nation's use of the dollar as the national currency, a move made in 2000 to curb inflation, still makes sense.
But there is an undercurrent of schadenfreude when it comes to America's pain. Commentator Boaventura de Sousa Santos scolded the United States for its "ironhanded evangelizing" that free markets, privatization and deregulation were innately more virtuous than "corrupt and efficient" state-run economies.
"Millions were thrown into unemployment, lost their land and labor rights and had to emigrate," the Portuguese-born Santos wrote in an article widely distributed over the Internet.
Read more about how the United States woes are also Latin America's problems.
Click here for more on business.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Stock traders negotiate at the Mercantile & Futures Exchange in Sao Paulo, Brazil, last week. Credit: Mauricio Lima / AFP / Getty Images
 Voters in Ecuador overwhelmingly approved a new constitution Sunday that would concentrate power in the hands of socialist President Rafael Correa, advance his reformist agenda and enable him to remain in office until 2017, exit polls indicated.
The constitution was drafted last summer by a special congress convened by Correa, who was elected in a 2006 landslide by voters exasperated by this country's chronic corruption, political instability and ineffectual lawmakers.
According to the exit count conducted by government-commissioned pollster Santiago Perez, 66% approved the constitution and 25% voted against it. The independent Cedatos-Gallup poll said the yes vote was 70%. Voters were required by law to vote on the constitution as a package, not by individual provisions.
Very early returns showed 65% support with 5% of the vote counted.
Read the rest of the dispatch on Ecuador's new constitution here, and for more on Ecuador in general, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Chris Kraul
Mexico City:
Deborah Bonello
Ken Ellingwood
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette