Latin American Telecommunications: Telefónica’s Conquest. Gabriela Martínez. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. 152 pp. $65 hbk.
While of somewhat tangential value to journalism or mass communication researchers, this brief monograph provides a timely assessment of the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica.
The focus is on how the company has penetrated many Latin nations over the past decade or so, in the process transforming itself from a once backward national carrier to a multi-national conglomerate of global importance. The book is important, in part, for helping to address the relative dearth of English-language communications material on Central and South America.
The author, a Peruvian now on the journalism faculty at the University of Oregon, bases her study on her dissertation. She traces the rise of Telefónica from its 1924 formation as a subsidiary of the American ITT, its nationalization under the long Franco regime and its later privatization, and then its expansion (taking on its present name a dozen years ago) into taking over sixteen of the newly privatized telecommunication carriers of South America. By 2005, Telefónica was the sixth-largest telecommunications services company in the world.
Perhaps surprisingly, in light of usual business management reticence to open up to researchers, the company’s management in offices in both Madrid and Lima cooperated in Martínez’s scholarly efforts. After a brief introduction to provide context, chapters review the company’s formative years, Spain’s joining of the European community and how that became an important factor in this story, the newly revitalized Telefónica as it has developed over the past two decades, its growing role in mass media (which may be of most interest to JMCQ readers), the operation of its charitable foundation, and the role of telecommunication culture and politics as demonstrated in a Latin American context.
This monograph is also valuable thanks in part to the author’s ready ability to use Spanish-language documents and source material that are often little known to scholars restricted to English-language archives. But it also underlines the pace of organizational as well as technical change in Latin telecommunication networks.
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University