by Julie Schneider 

Julie Schneider is the border information manager of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Program at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) in Silver City, New Mexico. In this article, she examines the uses on Internet in Latin America and at the U.S.-Mexico border, and suggests ways in which grassroots activists can use this unprecedented tool for networking, reseach and education. 
Schneider can be reached at irc_julie@zianet.com.
 

The U.S.-Mexico border, the physical juncture of North and South, is a dynamic and complex region where the social processes of economic integration are clearly evident. Examing the status and needs of the people and the environment on the border is illuminating because it is here, on the line between "developed" and "developing," where the structural inequities and environmental challenges of this era of corporate-driven globalization are becoming increasingly apparent. 

All of us are members of interrelated communities. People must have access to communities, networks, and information at all levels in order to effectively participate in societal or global decision-making. As will be discussed in this article, activists at the U.S.-Mexico border region are discovering ways of using the Internet as an essential organizing tool. They know that the information needed to make decisions should have no boundaries or barriers.
 

Is the Internet "Free"?

While the Internet was first developed for military and academic institutions, it was soon taken up by grassroots organizations. Even the U.S. government fathomed its importance, as shown in vice president Al Gore's description of the web's "brave new world" at an International Telecommunications Union meeting in 1994:

The Global Information Infrastructure would be a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on the continent. These highways or, more accurately, networks of distributed intelligence will allow us to share information, to connect, and to communicate as a global community. From these connections we will derive robust and sustainable economic progress, strong democracies, better solutions to global and local environmental challenges, improved health care, and ultimately a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet. The Global Information Infrastructure will help educate our children and allow us to exchange ideas within a community and among nations. It will be a means by which families and friends will transcend the barriers of time and distance.

Over the last five years since this speech was given, we have seen an exponential growth of the Internet that is unparalleled in communication development. We have seen both developed and developing countries allocate the money and resources needed to create the telecommunications lines and hardware technologies that form the infrastructure backbone. We have seen governments, universities, libraries, and schools become connected to the Internet the world over. We have seen businesses take their commercial enterprises online offering product information, advertising, catalogs of products, and Internet shopping. And we have seen NGOs, community-based groups, grassroots organizations, and individuals embrace the Internet as a networking, informational, and communications tool to influence economic, political, cultural, environmental, and social change.

However, the Internet is not the unlicensed, unregulated, uncensored, and free communications medium that had been envisioned. Internet Service Providers are licensed and the leased lines, fibers, satellites, routers, and hubs they use are tightly controlled by major commercial enterprises. It is an expensive venture to provide Internet service. High costs with uncertain returns have claimed many companies that could not compete in this new marketplace by providing the value-added services that most Internet users demand. Costs are decreasing over time as more and more of the infrastructure is developed and put into place, but additional money will be needed in the future as old technologies need to be replaced.

There have been many attempts (and some successes) to regulate and censor information found on the Internet. Not only have violent and pornographic sites become a target for censorship efforts but many far left-wing and far right-wing groups have experienced the pressure to conform to the "standards of the status quo." The Internet was first conceived in the United States and the vast majority of the initial growth was in the U.S. also. This has had a tremendous impact on the way in which the Internet developed. Most of the sites on the World Wide Web are in English and most conform to western standards and culture. Not all countries subscribe to the same norms, and conflicts result from global access to an unrestricted Internet content.

Probably one of the biggest and most publicized hypes of the Internet is as a "free" information resource. But a no-cost telecommunication network that would be available worldwide has failed to materialize. In fact, the expense of having Internet access in many of the developing countries is quite high and nearly inaccessible to much of their population. These countries lack the communication infrastructure needed to support nationwide access and considerable financial investment is needed to first implement the necessary hardware. In addition, effective use of the Internet requires a computer, a modem, an Internet Service Provider, and a phone line. Many people in developing countries lack the resources needed to purchase these items. In some cases, even when the money is available, it can take months to have a phone line installed. While costs are diminishing and while there have been initiatives to provide public use of the Internet in schools, libraries, and universities; the Internet is far from being a "free" information resource.
 

The Emergence of Internet in Latin America

Latin America has seen a tremendous growth in the Internet in the last few years. In fact, statistics show that Latin America has experienced the fastest Internet growth of any world region. Part of that growth is due to the popularity of the World Wide Web. The web offers flexibility and a user-friendly interface that provides access to multiple information formats. Probably the most significant reason for the Internet growth has been the expansion of Internet Service Providers into the Latin American market. Companies that have been major players in the Internet market in the United States, like America Online and Yahoo, have begun to expand their markets into Latin America. Yahoo has launched its Yahoo en Español website and America Online has created a partnership with a telecommunications company in Venezuela to provide Internet access to countries in Latin America. Interest in this particular market has spawned new company start-ups, such as Star Media also. They see Latin America as the biggest untapped market for providing access and e-commerce opportunities. With millions in seed money available to them, they now have over 220 employees and boast impressive gains in sites hosted and numbers of registered users.

However, there are still impediments to Latin America embracing everything that the Internet has to provide. In addition to the lack of a significant telecommunication infrastructure, Latin America also faces an Internet that is still primarily in English. It is the dominant language of the Internet and many may question whether important material is even available in other languages. While the government, universities, and organizations are working to maintain information-rich sites on the web, much work needs to be done. Latin American businesses are beginning to post online catalogs to the web and are narrowing their focus to a local market. Search engines have been developed that primarily dedicate themselves to providing information on websites of Mexican origin. It has been theorized that as more of the world becomes connected and the culture of the Internet shifts away from a Western focus, there will be a greater interest in developing countries to utilize the Internet to its fullest potential.
 

Internet at the Border

The U.S.-Mexico border region has an important presence on the World Wide Web that has developed significantly over the last two to three years. Because of the conflict over ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement, many grassroots organizations were created that addressed concerns of the long-term effects of the Agreement on the border region. These organizations were effective in focusing international attention on the area and the negative impact that NAFTA could have. They utilized many of the communication tools of the Internet to get the message out to a worldwide audience and found a global population that was sympathetic. The Internet has grown to become a powerful communication and informational tool for activists all over the world. The speed with which information can be disseminated and the immediacy and volume of response can be very gratifying for an isolated group.

How do organizations use the Internet most effectively? This networked environment can be used to build awareness, to facilitate training, to raise funds, to manage and disseminate information, to communicate, to share ideas, to interact with other groups and organizations, to publicize and advertise, to collaborate, to develop partnerships, to participate, and to network.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots groups have used the Internet extensively to locate, to acquire, and to disseminate information. Many governments have put a significant amount of useful information on the web. Libraries have played an important role by providing access to online catalogs, to full-text documents, and to bibliographic databases. Web-based databases have been created, maintained, and updated dynamically over the Internet. Some individual librarians have taken it upon themselves to research the web extensively and provide links to many of the most valuable pages. These sets of links are referred to as webliographies and there are some excellent examples of sites that provide hundreds of links to U.S.-Mexico border related sites.

Molly Molloy at New Mexico State University has put together an impressive set of web links on Latin America and on the border region specifically (http://lib.nmsu.edu/subject/bord/laguia).

The University of Texas at Austin has expended a considerable amount of time and effort to put together one of the most extensive webliographies created on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border region http://www.lanic.utexas.edu/.

Border Ecoweb at San Diego State University has begun an excellent site for locating information about the environment of the border region http://www.borderecoweb.sdsu.edu/.

The Interhemispheric Resource Center's Information for Citizen Transboundary Action, or INCITRA, borderlands program, has also begun putting together hundreds of links to valuable information on the U.S.-Mexico border region, with an emphasis of border environmental issues http://www.irc-online.org/incitra.

Non-governmental organizations and community-based groups that have a web presence are also generally regular Internet users. There are literally hundreds of sites that devote at least a portion of their website to U.S.-Mexico border issues. A small sample of these include: Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos (http://www.unam.mx/amdh/index.html); Arizona Toxics (http://www.primenet.com/~aztoxic); Centro de Estudios Fronerizos y de Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (http://www.giga.com/~cefprodh); Environmental Defense Fund (http://www.edf.org); Río Grande/Río Bravo Basin Coalition (http://www.utep.edu/rioweb); Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy (http://vpr2.admin.arizona.edu/udall_center); and hundreds more. There are also many groups and organizations that do not have a website but do use the Internet for information, communication, and networking (see borderlands resource list). Many groups pool resources to have a single computer for many individuals, or even multiple groups, in order to gain access to this worldwide information resource.
 

Internet for Grassroots Organizing

The World Wide Web is slowly replacing libraries as primary locations for information. Check the web if you are looking for government documents, journal articles, legislative reports, individual and organizational analysis of an issue, census figures, statistical databases and compilations, working papers, online discussions of issues, photographs, videos, and much more.

NGOs, community-based groups, and grassroots organizations also use the Internet extensively for networking. It is in networking that NGOs have made the most effective use of the Internet for advocacy, awareness building, consultancy, education and sensitization, identifying resources, impact analysis, knowledge creation, mutual support, news & events information, program and project support, research, and training courses. This utilization is particularly important in developing countries where standard forms of telecommunication media, including television, radio, telephone, and newspapers may be disproportionately allocated and utilized. It is through the Internet that NGOs are provided with a communication tool that works quickly and globally to get messages out.

Another important way that NGOs are using the Internet is to collaborate with other organizations and grassroots groups and to develop partnerships. In the past, many NGOs have had to work in a vacuum or take a very proactive approach to finding other individuals and groups working on common issues and towards common goals. The Internet made it possible to develop networks of cooperative efforts among like-minded organizations to broaden their capabilities for analysis, activism, and action. These networks are challenging the local, regional, national, and global status quo to reexamine its relationship to its constituencies and its impact on the earth. Problems that were analyzed as local issues are being reexamined in the global arena of the Internet as problems and issues that have taken on worldwide importance.

The final way that NGOs, community-based groups, and grassroots organizations are embracing the Internet is through communication. Multiple online technologies have allowed NGOs to communicate with their members and with other organizations sharing similar activities. Through online questions-and-answer forums, electronic mail, and mailing lists, NGOs alert members to breaking news stories, elicit sympathetic participation, garner support, mobilize people, recruit new members, discuss and analyze important issues, and participate in one-on-one communication between existing organizational members.

The following are some questions to think about when planning to use the Internet as a transboundary resource tool: How can we best utilize this new communication tool? Should we use it as a complement to our current communication methods or should it be a substitute? How can we add value to the information that is currently on the World Wide Web? How do we evaluate what is useful information and what has been posted by an uninformed advocate for change? Should we even be concentrating our efforts on a medium that is accessible by such a small percentage of the world's population? By endorsing and using the Internet exclusively for providing information, are we actually widening the gap between the information have and have-nots? What can we do to facilitate access to the Internet on the U.S.-Mexico border? How do we provide the training that people need to utilize the Internet most effectively? Is the Internet a crutch that is truly minimizing human interactions or is it a new tool for reaching out to isolated populations? How will the Internet continue to be used as an activist tool in the future? Does the Internet, as an information and communication technology, actually profit those who need it least, while ignoring those who need it most? 

The Internet allows us to examine critical border issues such as immigration, labor and environment in greater detail. It helps us collaborate with other organizations and question our role in shaping the future of the area. The Internet is an extremely valuable resource tool for communication, information, and networking and, because of it, we are just beginning to view our world as a much smaller, interrelated community.