Travel Notes: Reflections on Puerto Cabezas

by Miguel Peirano

Migeul Peirano, E-LAW Technology Circuit Rider

Puerto Cabezas, home to barely 20,000 people, is the largest city on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The eastern seaboard of Nicaragua is sparsely populated and poor, even by the standards of Central America`s poorest nation. Most of the people there are Miskito -- the traditional inhabitants of the region -- living together with significant minorities of English-speaking blacks and mestizos.

Not much has attracted the world to Puerto Cabezas. A few trawlers catch wonderful seafood that is shipped directly to New Orleans. A couple of logging companies extract precious timbers with no thought of sustainability. That`s about it.

Two years ago I arrived in Puerto Cabezas to find out why it was possible that a provincial capital of nearly 20,000 couldn`t afford the facilities for people to send a simple electronic message.

E-LAW had a valued partner working in Puerto and she was reduced to hearing second-hand news and to speaking through intermediaries who happened to be traveling to more "civilized" places like Managua.

That partner, Lottie Cunningham Wren, is a Miskito Indian lawyer who represents communities on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua who seek to protect their native lands. Lottie is frustrated by her limited access to communications tools. Out of her frustration grew our determination to help in any way we could and bring Puerto Cabezas closer to the "connected world."

It wasn`t an easy thing to do because the technical barriers would have challenged even the most generous of budgets.

A fortuitous event kindled our hopes. A pan-Caribbean fiber optic ring, called Arcos II, needed to land in Puerto to reach the Nicaraguan market. We tried to convince the local operators to spare some bandwidth for the town, but there was little interest. Later, we learned that the local university (URACCAN) had secured funding from the Ford Foundation to establish a satellite uplink tied to a public-access cyber cafe of sorts, aptly named the Communications Centre.

Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua

I returned to Puerto in June to try to persuade URACCAN to offer remote connections at the Communications Centre to local customers like Lottie. I brought a basic Linux machine donated by the University of Oregon Computing Center, and an external modem. I had no idea that I was going to find URACCAN virtually wallowing in a sea of expensive hardware it had acquired from Ford -- Hardware that made the gift I was bearing look rather humble.

Fortunately, I found that I had other things to contribute. I made contact with the person in charge of putting all that hardware together, a courageous young woman named Ada Villareal. I say courageous because her job description could have been that of an entire team of experts.
She had a basic computer degree and was in charge of establishing computer facilities and linkages on three campuses in the most isolated spots one can imagine: Puerto Cabezas, Bluefields, and Nueva Guinea. With help from the Network Startup Resource Center, we sent Ada to a training workshop for networking professionals in Puerto Rico.

I showed Ada how to install and configure a Linux host and how to trick Windows workstations to believe they are hosted by a Windows file server. Some of the work was delayed because we could not get a simple tool needed to make network cables. We tried to get the tool sent from Managua, but twice received the wrong item.

It was virtually impossible to configure and test the dial-up service because the Communications Centre had only one phone line. All of this was enough to convince us that the new wireless technologies will eventually carry the day, and we are now aiming our efforts in that direction.

Lottie continues to visit the Communications Centre to check her e-mail, but I think E-LAW`s contributions will go a long way if URACCAN is able to provide direct access from Lottie`s office in the future. As far as our partners are concerned, these advances represent important groundwork for connecting grassroots advocates in Nicaragua to the legal tools and scientific resources they need from around the world.

Miguel Peirano, based in Uruguay, is the E-LAW U.S. Technology Circuit Rider for Latin America.