Oxymoron of the day: Microsoft Works
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Green activist dreams of cutting Internet links
What happens when you put a big business opportunity backed by the World Bank, a corporate giant like Finnish company Botnia, hard-core environmentalists worried about pollution of their pristine coastal tourist-attracting hometown, and a president across the river who backs the construction of the large cellulose pulp mill plant, despite the protests, all into a blender?
And what if that president suddenly appears to be taking diplomacy lessons from North Korea's Kim Jong-il?. Well, things obviously get out of control... as each side refuses to concede and positions turn radical. You can read a good summary about the origins of the dispute on the mighty Wiki here.
Gee, let's cut this cable and leave Uruguay off the Net
What started off as a legitimate international diplomatic dispute over the construction of what will be one of
the World's biggest cellulose pulp mills in on the Uruguay River - one of the natural borders between Uruguay and
Argentina - has indeed reached ludicrous levels.
In an article published over the weekend in local newspaper Pagina/12, one of the green activists sugested "cutting an internet node that sits right here, 30 inches inches below the ground level," and apparently crosses towards Uruguay, "leaving the country without Internet access". Apparently, that would teach the Uruguay president and the World Bank a lesson. Of course, he claims that would be an option only if the current protest plan of blocking one of the international bridges that connect the two nations fails to halt the construction of the opposed plant.
Leaving aside the silliness of such sabotage plans - as if the Internet backbone were concentrated into a single fibre link - and even the feasibility of such act of sabotage, the gaucho McGyver wannabe who is quoted anonymously in the article missed one critical fact: the backbone fibre links hit Uruguay first and then head South-West towards Argentina. Oops.
A bird's eye view of the half a dozen fibre links
built in the late '90s and which hook South America to the Net
As you can see in the map above, cutting any of the links "leading to Uruguay" would in fact have the reverse effect, cutting a section of Argentina's backbone from the rest of the international network.
Of course, nobody takes these sabotage acts seriously, perhaps only the anonymous "IT technician" himself. Plus, almost all of those links are owned by foreign or multinational corporations, like Global Crossing, so the chances of any act of sabotage by any lone green nut going unpunished are slim.
Life in South America is exciting and interesting, there's no reason to get bored, ever. Even when the economy is recovering, unemployment is falling, we the locals always find new ways to complicate things - with a little help of the World Bank of course - so that we can get busy and outraged pursuing bi-national disputes. Must be in our latin blood. Still, we're not to the point of building walls between nations as some of our friends up North, yet. In any case, my advice to our Euroland readers is: feel free to purchase a copy of the book entitled " resolving environmental conflicts" and visit the region if you fancy so. Rest assured, there will be no war, and I for one will make sure that the data keeps flowing on our internet links. µ
L'INQS
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See also
INQ's Visual Guide to Expocomm Argentina 2006
Microsoft disappears from Telecomms
show, booth collapses
INQ's Expocomm Argentina 2006 coverage
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