As part of a plan to increase the digital literacy in Venezuela by distributing computers to schools, Venezuela made an agreement with Portugal to buy one million Classmate laptops. The agreement includes the creation of a factory in Venezuela to build the computers. The Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Socorro Hernandez, reported that Portugal will deliver 500,000 computers during the first and second quarter of 2009. In the third quarter of 2009, the factory based in Venezuela will be completed and is expected to manufacture, initially, 500,000 more laptops. The bilateral arrangement with Portugal is valued at more than $3 billion, which includes delivering a million barrels of oil to Portugal.

The Classmate PC is a project created by Intel, more or less like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). Portugal started to manufacture the PC’s in the country as part of a project to distribute computers for free or at the cost of 50 Euros to all their students. In Portugal, the computers are called “Magalhães” (in English, “Magellan”), named after the Portuguese maritime explorer. The computers come with a Atom N270 1.6GHz Processor, 512MB memory, built-in camera, built-in microphone and speakers, USB ports, and more. You can see all the specifications here. The ones that will be used in Venezuela will run the Venezuelan Debian distribution Canaima.