Only about half are connected to the Net. If each Latin American home were miraculously supplied with a computer, many folks would be hard pressed to use them. In the rest of the country, as much as half the population might be functionally illiterate, according to some estimates. And phone services tend to cost them more. Heavy individual telephone users receive phone bills as much as three times higher than their US counterparts, according to data published by the Interamerican Development Bank.
Plastic phobia presents a problem for aspiring Latin e-merchants.
First, there just aren t many credit cards around. And many of those who do wield plastic are reticent to punch their numbers into a computer. Mexicans are very suspicious, says Otavio Islas Carmona, director of the Internet Project at the Mexico City campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology. We don t believe in giving out our credit card numbers. We like to see the people we re dealing with.