Wired, Wired Youth

Latin Trade, Jan, 2001 by Greg Brown

COMPETITION, CLASS AND, ABOVE ALL, COMMUNICATION--these are the hallmarks of the eternal teen struggle for all things cool. LATIN TRADE correspondent Julie Dulude spent some time on the road in Central America, talking to kids about their favorite techie toys, like cell phones, Web-based mail and beepers. We got enough drama to write our own telenovela Kids are chatting up foreigners, keeping tabs on lovers, showing off and generally misbehaving--and using the latest in communication tools to do so. Let's listen in:

GUATEMALA

LESTER ASTURIAS AND CARLOS TRUJILLO SOCRATES BAR, PANAJACHEL

Lester Asturias and Carlos Trujillo of Guatemala City, both 20, talk about their cell phones as if they were modern-day leashes. "Our parents gave them to us to control us," says Trujillo. Many parents used to keep tabs on their kids with beepers. But cell phones are so cheap now that one hardly ever sees beepers anymore. Trujillo's dad pays about US$20 per month for the cell phone, only $2.60 more than for a regular line. "Now that you can leave messages on cell phones, beepers just aren't popular," Trujillo says.

ISAAC AND ABRAHAM TOL RAMOS CHICHINET INTERNET CAFE, CHICHICASTENANGO

The artisan markets of Chichicastenango draw thousands of visitors each year, and Isaac Tol Ramos, 17, seems to have befriended every last one of them. The young Guatemalan spends at least an hour each week e-mailing people he has met from the United States, Canada, Europe and Mexico. When he's not logged onto Web-based Hotmail, Ramos spends his time in the Sala Internacional of Yahoo! Chat, talking online. "I've made a lot of friends that way, just being here in Chichi," he says. His parents. gladly pay the eight U.S. cents per minute as long as Ramos also researches the movie schedule on DirecTV This week: Wild Wild West and Fight Club. Ramos is already teaching his brother Abraham, 11, how to work the Web, an Internet rite of passage his own friends gulded him through soon after Chichinet--the town's only Internet cafe--set up shop a year ago.

LYONEL GARCIA GONZALEZ, CHRISTIAN PAREDES MOLINA AND FRIENDS

LA FONDA DE LA CALLE REAL, ANTIGUA

Party, party, party. There seems to be little else on the minds of Lyonel Garcia Gonzdlez and Christian Paredes Molina, both of Guatemala City. Their cell phones help them squeeze in as much of it as possible. On any given night, the two 18-year-olds and their group of 10 split up to cruise the city. When one finds a good party, he rings the others. "That's howl found out the plan tonight was to meet up in Antigua," Garcia points out. The phones, gifts from their parents, have also been life savers--like when Garcia totaled his father's Audi on the way home from a New Year's party at a beach house and called home for help. "We got very drunk," he says with bravado. "Very drunk." Much to their dismay tonight's gathering breaks up at an early 10:30 p.m. when one of the teens gets an angry "get home" call from dad. Since he's the ride for half the group, the partying screeches to a halt. "I always check to see who's calling, and if it's my dad, I just let it ring and tell them there was no signal," grumbles Pare des.

JULIO ESQUIVEL AND LUIS ALBERTO

EL CAPITAN COMMERCIAL CENTER, GUATEMALA CITY

Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do? For the parents of Julio Esquivel, 17, of Guatemala City, the answer was to buy their son a cell phone. "I go out a lot at night, and come home pretty late," says a grinning Esquivel, in his fourth year at military school. Esquivel used to carry a beeper, but he says he didn't receive many of his messages. His parents were already paying US$19.50 a month for the beeper, and only $6.50 more got them 100 minutes of cell time, so forking out the extra cash for the phone was worth it, he says.

HONDURAS

PAOLA RODRIGUEZ,AMPARO LEMUS AND DUNIA MEJIA OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, TEGUCIGALPA

"My boyfriend gave it to me when I moved here to study. Me tiene controlada," giggles Paola Rodriguez, 20, of Santa Rosa de Copan, as she dials on her Nokia 280 cellular phone. The apartment she shares with two other pharmacy students has no telephone, she explains, and it doesn't look like they'll have one in the near future. "It's really hard to get lines here, and it's actually more expensive to call Copan from a normal phone than from a cell phone," she says. On the cell phone, however, it's costlier to call within the city than it is on a fixed line. So Rodriguez relies on the cell phone to call home and a pay phone for local calls. The hardest part of keeping costs down is saying no to friends. "Other people are always trying to take advantage of it for a llamadita," she says, "but they're not the ones paying the bill."

JOSE ISRAEL REYES ESCOBAR AND FRIENDS METRO CENTRO MALL, SAN SALVADOR

Jose Israel Reyes, 19, says he's using technology to get ahead in the world. The day before a big test, the second year med student from San Vicente crams his electronic agenda full of information he's afraid he'll forget. Since electronic agendas double as calculators, the professors won't take it away. "I can't remember everything," he says with a grin. While students no longer pad themselves with handwritten cheat sheets, they also don't need to risk glancing over at someone else's answers. With their phones on vibrator mode, he and his friends taking tests in large auditoriums can confer without fear of discovery That said. how come Israel only scored a 92 on his statistics test? Maybe he knows not to push his luck