Pursuits
Carlos Slim Bested by Mobile Billionaire Lopez in Guatemala
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When Mario Lopez Estrada was head of Guatemala’s state telecommunications monopoly in the 1980s, making a phone call in the war-ravaged Central American nation was a hopeless endeavor.
Most cities didn’t have a single working phone. Switchboards were overloaded amid one of the lowest penetrations in Latin America, at 1.5 lines per 100 inhabitants. Getting a landline could take years, prompting businesses to abandon phones for two-way radios. Lopez saw an opening.