The establishment of a regional news agency for Latin America to improve the balance of news flow and increase the transmission of news more applicable to regional problems has often been proposed. Despite wide acceptance of the concept, the birth of the Third World's first regional news agency, Agencia Latinoamericana de Informacion (LATIN), has gone virtually unnoticed. This paper documents the history and current operation of LATIN and discusses the political and economic problems that have beset the agency during its formative years. Interviews with LATIN staff and management, other Latin American journalists, and scholars indicate that LATIN is not a failure, as rumored, but rather a small, increasingly viable force in Latin American mass communication. Content analysis of wire service content of newspapers using LATIN supports the thesis that LATIN material is widely used throughout Latin America. Content analysis also reveals that LATIN appears to have changed its original objectives and now challenges the international wire services for a share of the hard news market in Latin America. Although experiencing some resistance from the established wire services, LATIN has been successful in its new competitive role. (Author)