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Vol. 1, No. 86 -- August 7, 1995
The American Reporter
Copyright 1995 Joe Shea, The American Reporter
All Rights Reserved
VENEZUELA BOOTED FROM INTERNET FOR UNPAID PHONE BILLS
by Roy S. Carson
American Reporter Correspondent
CARACAS -- Latin tempers flared and unprintable epithets flew on
BBSes in Venezuela after the South American country was disconnected from
the Internet for the second weekend in a row.
Links were restored late Sunday afternoon but the crisis brings to
a head the continuing problems of the national networks, which are carried
on a single phone line connecting to the world via the United States.
"It's complete chaos here," said a BBS operator, speaking to the
American Reporter on condition of anonymity. "And we can't complain,
otherwise the bureaucrats will run roughshod over us with no redress."
Like several other Venezuelan BBS operators, he's on a plane first
thing this morning to make alternative internet link arrangements, quoting
the failure of the Venezuelan government-owned Conocit (scientific
research & development) organization to provide a dependable service for
its monopoly rights.
Venezuela was first linked to the Internet five years ago. And,
while Stateside it may have been designed to cope with a nuclear blast, it
wasn't created to cope with mounting unpaid phone bills.
Heightened by the Latin American country's economic and political
crisis, Venezuela's Internet crisis went critical on June 9 when (US)
Global Enterprise Services -- an AT&T contract supplier -- disconnected
Venezuela for delinquent telecommunications bills.
Global said it had given repeated fair warnings it could not
continue to subsidize Venezuelan Internet access, for which 3,000
academicians, researchers and political hangers-on pay just $10 a month.
Luis G. Rodriguez, until recently president of the Conicit
subsidiary, Reacciun -- which runs the internet feeder service -- flew
back from an early-June vacation in Hawaii to complaint that Global and
AT&T had unjustly pressured Venezuela to get payment.
He resigned when it turned out the bill was dated April, 1994.
In an e-mail to angry Venezuelan Internet subscribers, just before
his resignation was made public, Rodriguez admitted $81,000 of the tab was
being picked up by the International Development Bank even though it was
listed as a "recurring expense".
In subsequent revelations it was discovered that the Venezuelans
had successfully asked the IDB to bend their rules and that they had
circumvented the rules by making requisite promises and promptly
forgetting them.
Internet service to Venezuela was restored 20 days later, on June
29, when the Venezuelans paid their $35,000 share of the total Global
Enterprise Services bill, but for days both servers and their subscribers
were suffering from electronic tidal waves caused by an accumulation of
worldwide e-mail.
Reacciun's Rodriguez bluffed his way through a series of charges
and countercharges, blaming GES, AT&T, OTAC (the Venezuelan Foreign
Exchange Commission) and the Venezuelan Central Bank before he resigned.
Confusion spread as Ivan Valdes, Executive Director of Saicyt (a
subsidiary of Conocit's Internet access division) also resigned.
Valdes, in an interview with the American Reporter, would not link
his resignation to the Internet disconnection, but it was apparent he did
not want to be a scapegoat for a superior he said is vacationing in
Hawaii, and whom he blames for the Venezuelan Internet scandal.
Only a handful of more than 30 commercial providers operating in
Venezuela have been licensed by the government's CONATEL
(telecommunications regulatory body) to use alternate links, but while
insisting on full control the Venezuelan government admits it's incapable
of increasing capacity to cope with the commercial networks -- who have
been accused by Reacciun's now ex-President Rodriguez of having a "free
ride".
Commercial operators reject Rodriguez's chiding as nonsense and
say they've been paying through the nose for access to a "cash cow" that's
swiftly coming to a bitter end for Venezuelan politicians who -- it's
claimed -- have pocketed the proceeds.
The professor who brought the Internet to Venezuel, Patrick
O'Callaghan of Simon Bolivar University, is peeved and bemused.
"[It's] a God Almighty mess of bureaucratic bungling," he said,
which he predicts will probably never fully be investigated or explained
Bureaucrats are hurrying to cover their tracks and shift blame,
instead of resolving the mess that will probably see them disconnected
from world access again by September.
Disconnections ranging from 5 hours last weekend to two days this
past one have given Venezuelans a foretaste of worse things to come -- and
system operators are already heading Stateside to get signed up, illegally
or otherwise -- in case the internet is beached again when Conicit gets a
final notice to pay the remaining bills.
-30-
(Roy Carson is South American Bureau Chief of the American Reporter.)