Latin Love Affair
Source: Newsweek Issues 2006
Special Edition

I have traveled to six or eight countries in Latin America in the last two years, meeting with business people, education leaders and government leaders, and I can tell you: they know they need to enter the knowledge economy, and are working hard to attract the necessary investment. Two years ago, I gave a technology talk in Lima; 1,600 people came in the middle of the afternoon. We don't attract those kinds of crowds in the United States.

Not all Latin nations are equally clear on their goals. Uruguay and Brazil are bouncing back and forth between wanting manufacturing and software development. But they, too, show flashes of innovative potential. In Brazil, for example, during the hyperinfl ation of the early 1990s, banks had to deal with customers who were withdrawing money on a daily basis. So Brazilian banks moved earlier than American banks to automate and go online. Today, Brazil is one of the governments at the forefront of the open-source movement.