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Cellphones shrinking the Third World

By Hector Tobar
Los Angeles Times

HECTOR TOBAR / LOS ANGELES TIMES Tricycle-taxi driver Andres Alvarado uses his mobile phone to round up clients in the jungle city of Iquitos, Peru.

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"This is what they call the 'telephone of the jungle,' " says Alvarado, 23, a tricycle-taxi driver and tourist guide. Moments later, as children of the Bora Indian tribe come bounding down the path to answer the "telephone," Alvarado's belt begins beeping: It's his cellphone.

Iquitos and nearby riverside hamlets are among the more remote outposts in South America's expanding mobile-phone system, part of a global network that is beginning to penetrate even the poorest and most undeveloped corners of the world.

For millions of people living in countries where getting a fixed phone line remains a bureaucratic impossibility, the cellphone revolution has allowed them to leapfrog from archaic forms of communication straight into the digital era — and that is changing the fabric of their daily lives.

East meets West

In East Africa, the mobile phone has brought a first, tantalizing taste of modernity to people who live on less than $10 a day. In China, the world's biggest market for cellphones, they are embraced by rich and poor alike, a tiny pocket computer with which to surf the Internet, play video games or even do banking.

	NATALIE BEHRING-CHISHOLM / GETTY IMAGES, 2003 A Mongolian monk sends instant messages on his mobile phone at the Wudangzhao Monastery in Inner Mongolia, China.

Here in Iquitos, where speedboats and lumbering old fishing craft ply the brown, wide waters of the Amazon, fishermen grab the wheels of their vessels with one hand and their cellphones with the other to check the price their catch will fetch at markets downriver.

Alvarado uses his mobile phone to round up clients for his tricycle taxi. And earlier this year, it beeped with the most important call of his life.

"My mother-in-law called me from the delivery room," Alvarado recalled. His wife had gone into labor with their first child, a boy, and he raced to the hospital on his tricycle.

He flashed the news from the hospital to his sister in Lima, Peru, via his cellphone.

For Alvarado, who has rarely traveled beyond the river cities and hamlets of the Amazon, the change brought about by the cellphone has been profound — and rapid.

A few years back, when Alvarado's grandfather died in a town several days' journey upriver, his family in Iquitos learned the news by telegram. A mourning relative walked several hours to the telegraph office and dictated the sad news to a telegraph operator, who sent it to another office, where the message was typed and delivered by hand to the Alvarado household.

"By the time we found out, they had already buried him," Alvarado said.

A luxury amid poverty

The number of cellphones in Latin America has tripled since 1999, and one in five people now owns one. In Peru, as in many other countries in the region, there are more cellphones than fixed phone lines.

Today, the fastest-growing cellphone markets are in places like Iquitos in rural South America and in sub-Saharan Africa, despite widespread poverty.

"My cellphone gives me an 'address' just like any other businessman," said Baruwani Mbabazi, a money-changer who is part of a brisk trade in U.S. dollars in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. His $20 purchase of a used cellphone has liberated him from having to stand on the street waiting for customers.

"I can't imagine my business without it," Mbabazi said.

Rwanda's cellphone boom has followed a pattern typical of many developing countries. It now has more than five times as many cellphones (134,000) as fixed telephone lines (23,000), according to the International Telecommunications Union.

Staying in touch

As in Rwanda, people elsewhere across Africa are coming to appreciate and rely upon the magic of the cellphone — communicating with a distant friend while under a baobab tree in Mali, for example, or on the Kenyan savanna. In Senegal, farmers use them in their annual, age-old battle against plagues of locusts, calling each other and the authorities to keep track of the progress of "hopper bands."

In Somalia, men in loincloths flash their cellphones as they guide camels to port. Masai warriors in Tanzania pull phones from their red "shuka" robes to call gem brokers when they find glimmering purple-blue tanzanite, a rare gemstone found only in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

But mostly, Africans use their phones for the same purpose as people everywhere — conversation. "We're a nation of talkers," said Kayode Sukoya, a taxi driver in Lagos, Nigeria.

The cellphone is spreading, thanks to "prepaid" service plans, which can lower the cost to a few dollars a month.

In Lima, Peru's capital, vendors sell prepaid phone time the same way they sell peanuts: by standing between lines of cars waiting for the light to turn green. You hand over the equivalent of a few dollars and get a coded card, which you use to "charge up" your phone with time credit.

In Peru, these consumers far outnumber "postpaid" users, who get a bill for their calls each month.

"To get a postpaid cellphone, you need to have a consistent source of income, and since the economy here is mostly informal, people don't have that," said Juan Edgar Chavez, southern Peru sales director for Telefonica Moviles Peru.

Cellphones link people in the developing world in ways no one imagined just a few years ago.

In Brazil, drug kingpin Luiz Fernando da Costa was widely believed to have used a cellphone from his prison cell to control his minions in the "favelas," or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, leading authorities to install jamming devices outside the city's largest penitentiaries.

The cellphone is the communication instrument of choice for leaders of the secessionist Aymara Indian movement in the highlands of Bolivia, where it comes in handy when trying to coordinate strikes and highway blockades.

China has more than 300 million users. On the streets of Beijing, along with on-the-go businessmen, farmers chatter on cellphones as they drive their vegetables to market in mule-drawn carriages.

Xiao Zhao, a 15-year-old purveyor of false documents, uses his phone to keep one step ahead of the law.

"You can't glue yourself to a fixed telephone and still do the business," he said. "Once the police get your regular phone number, they'd be able to find out where you're living and have you arrested."

The text-message explosion in China has not escaped the attention of authorities, who this summer announced a plan to employ new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages.

Officials said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up "pornographic, obscene and fraudulent" phone messages. Some say the new scrutiny is aimed at squelching political dissent.

Chinese police sometimes use text messages as an anti-crime tool: When they find a cellphone that is being used for illicit purposes, they use a computer to call the phone and flood it with phony text messages, running up such a high bill for the owner that the phone becomes unusable.

Providing the reliable service the market demands is not easy in developing countries such as Peru, where engineers face a series of technical challenges presented by untamed jungles and rickety electrical grids.

Each base station requires electricity. "In rural areas, the electricity fluctuates," said David Holgado, Telefonica's chief technical officer. "It's supposed to be 220 (volts), but sometimes I get 160 or 250." Often, only battery power keeps the cellular station — and all the people using it to make calls — online.

The fishermen of Iquitos know all about ingenuity.

Having a cellphone can help you get a good price at the big catfish markets in faraway Leticia in Colombia, on the border with Peru and Brazil.

On the line

Juan Flores, who was elected president of the Artisan Union of Fishermen of Iquitos in part because he owns a mobile phone, talks about the phone signal the same way he might describe shifting currents and hazardous sandbars.

"When you get to the fork of the Ucayali or the Maranon, it doesn't work," he said, naming a couple of Amazon tributaries. "But in Tamshiyacu, the signal is pretty good. By the time you get to Yurimaguas and to Pucallpa, the signal is nice and strong."

The fishermen follow the signal upriver and down, in long, flat boats with thatched roofs that look a lot like floating cigars.

The other day, one of the ships of the Iquitos fleet, the El Veloz Quinto (Speedy the Fifth), hit a sandbar and began to sink. The captain couldn't raise the local river patrol on his radio. Luckily, he had a cellphone. He called their office and read them the riot act: "What's wrong with you guys, aren't you listening to the radio? Get out here quick, or I'm going to lose all my ice."

They saved the ship. But the ice was lost.

Times staff writers John M. Glionna and Yin Lijin in Beijing, Davan Maharaj in Nairobi, Kenya,

and Jube Shiver Jr. in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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