Latin America Data Base University of New Mexico University of New Mexico


EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT LATIN AMERICA (AND MORE)

by David A. Fryxell 1

The following database review appeared in the January/February 1994 issue of LINK-UP (v.10, i.7), "the Newsmagazine for Users of Online Services and CD- ROM" 2.

With the passage of NAFTA, suddenly Latin America is in the news-- and on the corporate agenda--as it hasn't been since the building of the Panama Canal. "Look south, young executive," seems to be the advice to anyone looking to make some pesos in the brave new post-NAFTA world.

Unfortunately, for all too many norteamericanos their education about the countries south of our border ended sometime in the grade school, and few have learned much since beyond the difference between tacos and tostadas. For those seeking a crash course in Latin America, or advanced study in the latest in business developments south of the border, a modem and access to the Latin America Data Base (LADB) are prerequisites.

Based at the University of New Mexico, LADB was created in 1985 to make timely information about Mexico, Central America and South America readily accessible to scholars, businesspeople, activists and government officials. LADB users range from Duke University to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the US Senate Finance Committee to Witness for Peace. Corporate customers include Martin Marrieta Corp., Southwestern Bell, and Morgan Guarantee Trust.

For these users, logging on to LADB is a little like having some other kid--a really smart kid--do your homework. LADB researchers comb a host of international wire services (including the AP, Agence France- Presse, Knight-Ridder Financial News, Reuter and many others from around the globe), Latin American news broadcasts, official reports, and Latin American newspapers for the latest nuggets of news. Then these experts synthesize the most important facts into concise summaries, adding a smattering of analysis and commentary. (News summaries make up 90 percent of LADB's content, with 10 percent analysis.) Best of all, the result is all searchable using a powerful, fast and flexible software engine.

At the heart of LADB are four electronic publications whose weekly editions and back issues make up the database:

You can subscribe to each of these publications individually; issues arrive in your electronic mailbox (such as an Internet, Bitnet, or CompuServe address) much as print newsletters come to your postal box. One publication costs $125 a year for individuals, $225 for institutions; two publications, $220 and $395, respectively; and all three current publications, $315 and $565. Or you can subscribe to the database, which enables you to search current and back issues and then to read or download full-text articles. A year's flat-fee, unlimited usage subscription to LADB costs $800, or you can sign up for $1 a minute pay-as-you-go usage for an initial $50 fee. A combination subscription and database package runs $1,200 a year. Contact LADB at 1-800-472-0888.

The standard way to connect to LADB is through the Internet, via New Mexico Technet, by telnetting to ladb.unm.edu; subscribers receive a username and password enabling them to log on to LADB through Technet's Border Trade Network. And LADB publications are available on Dialog (file 636 and file 16), Data-Star (databases PTBN and PTSP), Mead Data Central (libraries Nexis, World and NSAMER), NewsNet (publications IT39, IT43, IT44 and IT99), Dow Jones News/Retrieval (Predicasts' Newsletter Database), and BRS (database PTSP).

Powerful Searching

But LADB is more than the sum of its publication parts; it's also a quick and powerful way to search through the thicket of information therein (more than 20,000 articles) for just the facts you want. You can search for a single word simply by typing it at the initial prompt; LADB's SEARCHmate software almost instantly responds with a scrollable list of articles containing your search term. A search for "NAFTA," for example, brings up a list of 291 articles. Enter the keyword "Pemex"-- the Mexican national oil company- and you'll get 451 citations. To make this mass of information more navigable, SEARCHmate lists the articles it finds in the order of most-to-fewest "hits." When you opt to read an article, your keyword is highlighted at each occurrence; pressing Return zips you ahead to the next occurrence.

You can also search LADB with a variety of more powerful strategies, refining your quest to get precisely what you want. You can search for phrases by enclosing the combination of words in either single or double quotation marks ("petrochemical industry," for example). You can truncate a word with an asterisk to find all the variations and plurals of it: brazil*, for example, would return articles containing Brazil, Brazilians and Brazil's. You can limit the search to deadlines by preceding the search term with <head>. And you can combine any of these strategies: to search for stories with petroleum or petrochemical in the headline, you could type <head> petro*.

Of course, you can also use the standard operators OR, AND, and NOT, separately or together. So while "rebel" retrieves more than 1,100 citations, a search for "rebel and Mexico" limits the results to 179 choices, among which you're far more likely to readily find information on the recent uprisings there. You can even search for words or phrases in proximity to one another, increasing the likelihood that the terms are related: "democra* transition"/4, for instance, would find instances where the two search terms occur within four words of one another, such as "democratic transition" or "transition to democracy."

In addition, you can limit your search by publication or by date (date ge 1/1/93, for instance, gives you articles with a date Greater than or Equal to 1/1/93). And you can hunt specifically for documents containing tables of statistics by using the special operator s/s.

All this is accomplished with remarkable speed, given the size of the database, and a reasonable level of userfriendliness. The only roadblock some users may experience along this leg of the information highway is caused by LADB's peculiar insistence on using function keys (PF1 through PF4 on a VT-100 keyboard) and the up-down-left-right arrow keys to navigate through the results of a search or to return to the main menu. Users with nonstandard keyboards or less-than-perfect VT-100 emulation in their communications software can find LADB frustrating and even impossible to use. LADB's documentation, too, assumes that you can bang out PF keys that it will understand, and gives no help or translation options if your keyboard and/or software aren't already correctly configured.

Assuming you can avoid or outsmart this problem, your LADB searches will unlock a wealth of information about Latin America. Much of what you'll find here never makes it to norteamericano news, and certainly not at this level of detail; anyone but a close watcher of Latin America will quickly encounter news and names that are completely unfamiliar. What's up with the M-19 Democratic Alliance in Colombian politics? How are the Sparrowhawk Indians of Brazil reacting to the illegal cutting of trees in forests on their reservations? (Not kindly.) What's the link between Sara Lee Corp., of supermarket poundcake fame, and the Mexican underwear industry? Where is the Guatemalan army buying its weapons?

LADB is particularly strong on political and human-rights issues. You'll read about problems that never surface in most U.S. media: murders of homosexuals in Brazil, repression of human-rights activists in Cuba, "disappearances" among detainees in Peru, prison riots in Venezuela.

Statistics are another strength. It's hard to imagine where else you could find some of these numbers, let alone find them with the ease that LADB allows: economic growth rates in Nicaragua, electric production from a joint Colombia-Venezuela project, drug-seizure totals in Panama, education and training budgets for Mexican corporations, rising tortilla prices in Mexico, the number of leprosy cases in Queretaro State, Mexico. Need to know how many hectares of sorghum were planted in Mexico in 1990? The answer (1.196 million) is at your fingertips with LADB.

You can also learn a surprising amount about the United States-- particularly U.S. businesses--from LADB. When J.C. Penney builds a half-dozen stores in Mexico, the news is here. You can read about Mexican reaction to plans to store nuclear waste in California's Mojave Desert, U.S. funding for water-quality studies of Guadalupe Lake in Mexico, or the effects of a banana-workers' strike on Standard Fruit Co. (a subsidiary of a U.S. firm).

LADB's articles are concise and fact-packed, most combining information from several sources (listed, with dates, at the end of each article). Each publication contains from a half-dozen to two-dozen articles, ranging from a single paragraph to a couple of pages in length. Headlines make for easy scanning, whether you're reading whole publications or the results of a search (in which generally enough of each headline is displayed to allow you to decide whether to read the article or not). Text is clear and straightforward, neither as dense as an abstract nor (aside from the analysis pieces) as drawn-out as a magazine article.

In short, if you need to know about Latin America, or if the question nagging you is "What's after NAFTA?" the answer is the Latin America Data Base.

1 This article is being redistributed with permission from Learned Informaton, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055-8750, (609)654-6266. Link-Up is published bimonthly, six issues a year; the annual subscription rate in the U.S. is $26.50; in Canada and Mexico, $31.50.

2 David A. Fryxell is a frequent contributor to Link-Up and the author of "How to Write Fast" (Writer's Digest Books).