WORK at ECLAC, United Nations

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) --the Spanish acronym is CEPAL-- was established in 1948 and is headquartered in Santiago, Chile. It is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations. It was founded for the purposes of contributing to the economic development of the region, coordinating actions directed towards this end, and reinforcing economic relationships among the countries and with the other nations of the world (see for example the prominent work of Raul Prebisch). The promotion of the region's social development was later included among its primary objectives.

...after I realized that my interest in the importance of the Internet did not really receive much attention at the University of Chile in mid-2000, they sent me to Jorge Katz, Director of the Micro-economic Division at ECLAC, who, to my surpise, took those ideas pretty seriously. He guided me through my first publications and we ended up writing two books together...

This is part of the great team I had the pleasure to work with during the period of 2004-2008, while I acted as ECLAC's Information Society Programme's Coordinator. Together (with the help of another 236 external consultants) we assisted the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean to elaborate and agree on two Regional Action Plans (eLAC2007 & eLAC2010), we wrote more than 50 publications and 8 books, set up 3 databases and created visibility and support for the "ICT-for-development" topic by providing technical assistance and facilitating exchange of experiences...

from Newspaper article in Chilean El Mercurio, May 2008

Bavaro, Dominican Republic, 29-31 January 2003

The governments of Latin American and Caribbean negotiated and approved the Bavaro Declaration, the regional position for the negotiations in the World Summit on the Information Society. The first draft of this declaration was also born on my computer... In the final declaration, the issue of who governs the Internet was raised for the first time in an intergovernmental declaration. This issue was then brought to the World Summit and became an ongoing battle of interest between the government of the United States and several other countires that do not agree with the current model (see: http://www.intgovforum.org)

 

Rio de Janeiro, 8-10 June 2005

The governments of Latin American and Caribbean negotiated and aproved the 2005-2007 Regional Plan of Action for the Information Society:

eLAC2007 see: http://www.cepal.org/SocInfo/eLAC/

...the first draft was born on my computer, and has then received lots of positive input from collective work of many people and intergovernmental negotiations: at the Ministerial Conference we organized in Rio de Janeiro in 2005 http://www.riocmsi.gov.br/

Santo Domingo, 28-29 July 2004, with the President of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez

Quito, Ecuador, 4-6 May, 2005 (with Lucho Yañez, João Ferraz, Alvaro Diaz, Hernan Moreno)

...yes, the guy on the right hand side who Kofi Annan was greeting during his Santiago visit in 2003 is me...

Below, in 2007 with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (in office since 2006)

Santiago Chile, with the Predisent of Costa Rica, José María Figueres Olsen