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With sustained growth blessing the region, Latin America found itself with an expansive business sector and a demanding public sector, all looking to technology for answers to big social issue

Most Latin American nations could be described as straddling the gap of the digital divide in a sustained balancing act.

“digital divide” has become shorthand for any gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas with regards to both their opportunities and access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs

Despite the country’s gaping digital divide, the number of Facebook users in Nicaragua last year jumped from 150,000 to 700,000

Widespread accessibility to 3G cell phone technology makes it difficult to know just how many Nicaraguans are connecting to the Internet from hand-held devices, but estimates are that 10-30% of the Nicaragua’s 5.7 million people are now online.

The CINCO study estimates that Nicaragua has 579,000 Internet users with home connections, and another 250,000 who logon from Internet cafes, which are now found even the most remote corners of the country.

Latin America is currently poised to fall behind in the next big evolution of the Internet.

last year Latin America as a whole grew in IP traffic by 25 percent, with traffic growth for the mobile Internet at an incredible 87 percent.

things are not looking as bright for the growth of the Internet of Things there.

ICT (information and communications technology - or technologies) is an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems and so on, as well as the various services and applications associated with them

ability to create greater access to information and communication in underserved populations.

a means of bridging the digital divide.

The Nicaraguan Firewall: How the Narco Gangs Have Breached It

Nicaraguan military and police leaders insist they've created a "firewall" against the western hemisphere's more than $40 billion drug trade and the ultra-violent narco-gangs pushing in from both the north and the south.

the country is a leader in drug busts and has managed to reduce its homicide rate to the second-lowest in the region behind Costa Rica.

Ortega vs. the Contras: Nicaragua Endures an ’80s Revival

Tyson and his men are contras — yes, like the ones from the 1980s who received stealth funding during the Reagan administration to topple Mr. Ortega’s leftist Sandinista government.

That war ended more than 25 years ago, when Mr. Ortega lost at the polls. But since being re-elected in 2006, Mr. Ortega has come to rule over this Central American nation in sweeping fashion.

the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit?

Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.

The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas.

5,966,798 (July 2016 est.)

mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 69%, white 17%, black 9%, Amerindian 5%

Despite being one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Nicaragua has improved its access to potable water and sanitation and has ameliorated its life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and immunization rates. However, income distribution is very uneven, and the poor, agriculturalists, and indigenous people continue to have less access to healthcare services. Nicaragua's total fertility rate has fallen from around 6 children per woman in 1980 to just above replacement level today, but the high birth rate among adolescents perpetuates a cycle of poverty and low educational attainment. Nicaraguans emigrate primarily to Costa Rica and to a lesser extent the United States. Nicaraguan men have been migrating seasonally to Costa Rica to harvest bananas and coffee since the early 20th century. Political turmoil, civil war, and natural disasters from the 1970s through the 1990s dramatically increased the flow of refugees and permanent migrants seeking jobs, higher wages, and better social and healthcare benefits. Since 2000, Nicaraguan emigration to Costa Rica has slowed and stabilized. Today roughly 300,000 Nicaraguans are permanent residents of Costa Rica - about 75% of the foreign population - and thousands more migrate seasonally for work, many illegally.

90% percent of the region is covered by mobile broadband

only about 50% of those people are “connected” and online

three primary barriers to internet use: a lack of locally-relevant content, a lack of digital skills and limited affordability among segments of the population.

the big news out of Cartagena -- outside of the Secret Service wing of the Hotel Caribe, that is -- was the united front that Latin American countries put up against the United States on several big issues.

whether Cuba should be admitted to the next summit, in 2015, which the United States and Canada opposed and all 30 Latin American countries, both left-wing bastions like Ecuador and traditional U.S. allies like Colombia, favored, thus bringing the meeting to an end without a planned joint declaration

The idea of an "American camp" in Latin America has been an anachronism for some while, but this became glaringly clear in Cartagena. "We need them more than they need us," as Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society, puts it. The United States remains the region's largest trading partner, the source of 40 percent of its foreign investment and 90 percent of its remittances. U.S. foreign aid still props up shaky countries like Colombia and Guatemala. But trade with both China and Europe has grown sharply over the last decade. And both big economies like Brazil and Argentina, and smaller ones like Chile and Peru, have experienced solid growth at a time when the United States has faltered. "Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant to their needs,"

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.

The series of inquiries that ignited the public’s rage were the work of an uncommon alliance of local prosecutors and investigators backed by the United Nations, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala or by its Spanish-language acronym, Cicig.

Established in 2007 to help expose the ties between criminal networks and politicians, the commission eventually emboldened the nation’s own prosecutors to hold the elite to account, and become a source of inspiration for many Guatemalans. For much of its history, Guatemalan society has been divided, its different constituencies fighting their battles alone. The nation’s indigenous population, which suffered the most under the civil war, which killed about 200,000 people, has long struggled for equal rights with little success.

Yet the movement that began in April forged an unprecedented alliance of different groups. Guatemala City’s middle class, long reluctant to speak out, began joining forces with peasant and indigenous groups. Eventually, the nation’s church and business leaders also took the side of the protesters to demand change.