South America is an ideal base for services targeting the Latino population in the U.S., said Probir Ghosh, president of Denver-based Virtual Source Networking, a consulting company that helps companies outsource.
''Many countries like Colombia, Venezuela . . . still depend mainly on language-related work. A good amount of business that goes to South America would have a direct or indirect connection to language,'' Ghosh said.
Colorado-based outsourcing provider TeleTech Holdings, which has worked for Latin American companies in Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere for at least a decade, has seen demand from U.S. companies for services in those countries rise, said KC Higgins, a Teletech spokeswoman.
American companies, which rushed to India - a 600-pound gorilla among offshoring destinations - over the past 10 years, are looking elsewhere as wages have risen in that country, said Peter Ryan, senior analyst at market research company Datamonitor.
India and China still lead the pack as locations for offshore jobs, but other countries are emerging as alternatives. Health care and financial services are among a host of industries that are sending jobs to such far-flung locations as Brazil, Romania, Colombia, Ireland, Israel, Hungary, South Africa and Egypt.
The trend has roused the ire of the American labor movement. The Communications Workers of America, which has targeted the technology sector for organizing, estimates that American companies have sent more than 500,000 jobs to foreign countries since 2000.
Argentina has been aggressive in seeking trade agreements that have enhanced its ability to win work from American companies, said Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech CWA, the Communications Workers of America's organizing arm for tech workers.
Industry ''wants to develop a global supply chain of labor; they are equating offshoring to an assembly line. More and more workers are competing for fewer and fewer jobs, and this drives down wages,'' Courtney said.
The collapse of the peso in 2002 sent Argentine wages plummeting below the level paid in India and helped to attract U.S. business to the South American country.
TeleTech's Latin American revenue rose from $91.7 million in 2004 to $171.7 million in 2006. Much of the new work is in Argentina, Higgins said.
''In 1997, 100 percent of the work we did in Argentina was for Argentine companies, and that is no longer the case. We started with one site; now we have three, and we continue to expand,'' Higgins said.
TeleTech also is expanding into other emerging nations. The company recently opened its first Costa Rican ''delivery center,'' where workers provide both front- and back-office functions, and expects to begin operating another in South Africa soon.
