This panel explores twentieth-century Latin American experiments in the use of communication and information technologies (radio, television, newsprint, recordings, satellite) in education programs. The creators and recipients of these communications projects sought to proselytize, convert, modernize, assimilate, integrate, assert national sovereignty, construct community, defend against imperialism, and stem the influence and spread of revolutionary ideologies in Guatemala, Ecuador, and Colombia. What was the impact of the proliferation of personal radios and television sets in households across Latin America for purportedly educational purposes? And what kinds of relationship did students and teachers develop to this novel technology? Although Latin America is rarely singled out in technology and information studies as a pioneer or early adopter in this field, as panelist Vanessa Freije notes, governments in the region “invested heavily in radio transmitters, newsprint production, microwave broadcasting systems, and eventually satellites" over the course of the twentieth century, and by the 1980s, “Latin America was a frontrunner in global communications adoption.” One paper in this panel explores this bold assertion in a study of Bogotá, where the Colombian government launched one of the world’s first tele-education projects in 1962 with material and technical support from the Peace Corps and USAID. The papers on religious programs in Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia, moreover, show that innovative experiments in exploiting the possibilities afforded by mass-media based technologies were not solely the prerogative of states or political leaders. The case of Radio Sutatenza/ Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO), a mass-media-based radio broadcasting, rural leadership, and community development network founded in 1947 by a Colombian priest that evolved into an internationally recognized, widely emulated, experiment of transnational scope illustrates how radio school listeners in different Colombian regions— including areas where Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations predominated—interacted with, challenged, selectively appropriated, or rejected ACPO’s educational and community development materials and interacted in varied ways with communications technologies, altering one-channel radio sets, turning to Protestant evangelical broadcasts delivered in their native languages, etc. Indeed, the ACPO “radio school” system inspired priests working in Guatemala, and a study of the first decade of Guatemala’s first and longest-running Maya K’iche’ radio school reveals the ways that technology, development, and education projects had to be negotiated both locally and transnationally for this kind of enterprise to succeed. The themes of radio broadcasting, education, missionaries, and Indigenous communities are also present in the history of powerful, Quito-based, The Voice of the Andes/La Voz de los Andes, the first radio station to provide daily programming in Ecuador and the first Christian Missionary radio station in the world, established in 1931 with transnational funding and Indigenous language programming for evangelical proselytizing purposes. Taken together, these papers present the diverse politics and uses of mass communications in Latin America from the interwar period through the height of the Cold War, illustrating new directions in studies of technology, education, and power.