TAVALO, Ecuador -- ROY COOPER pawed through hundreds of tapestries, searching for a fetching combination of colors and print. Nothing caught his eye until a tiny, toothless woman wearing a felt fedora and dozens of gold necklaces presented a black and tan rug with geometric patterns.

"Runners in dark shades and earth tones, that's all anyone wants," Mr. Cooper, a 52-year-old Kentucky native, said in Spanish with a thick Southern drawl. "The gringos won't pay a dime these days for the brightly colored rugs, so forget the reds and pinks."

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Mr. Cooper, who has lived in Quito with his Ecuadorean wife, Eulalia, for 23 years, bargained the price from $12 to $10, purchased the Navajo-style floor runner and lit a cigarette to celebrate: The rug will likely fetch $30 or more at auction on eBay, where he sells tapestries, baskets and religious relics at substantial markups. Mr. Cooper, who devotes 15 hours a week to buying, listing and shipping eBay items, clears roughly $1,300 a month from his online business, and up to $2,500 each November and December.

By contrast, the World Bank estimates that the average Ecuadorean earns $1,460 a year.

Mr. Cooper's business puts him in an elite group in Ecuador, not only by virtue of his income but also because of the tools with which he makes it. Of Ecuador's 13 million people, only 2.7 percent have been online, according to the government-owned communications company, Conatel.

Internet entrepreneurs flourish in Ecuador's largest cities, but many are educated businessmen with ties to the United States. Thousands of households in Quito (the capital) and Guayaquil (the largest city) have Internet access, but few rural communities have telephone lines.

The discrepancies make experts pessimistic. They worry that the rapid pace of change in the technology industry will cause third-world nations like Ecuador to slip further behind Europe and North America.

"In the late 1990's, everyone jumped up in arms over the digital divide, but it has proven almost impossible to bridge," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy-analysis center, and an expert on Latin America. "It is a region of inequality. Why would access to technology be any different than access to education, health care, employment or financial aid?"

In 2000, fewer than 1 percent of Ecuadoreans had sent e-mail or surfed the Web at home, school or work or in cybercafes. In August 2001, in an effort to expand access, the government created the National Connectivity Commission. Public "telecentros" have sprung up to provide free Internet access - under the auspices of nonprofit groups for which the commission helps find donors - and home connections, previously timed by the minute, are now available for a flat rate of about $25 a month.

"I know that in five years, most people in Ecuador still won't be able to buy a computer," said José Pileggi, president of Conatel, which oversees the connectivity project. "But my hope is that they will at least know that they have access to computers."

[Help may also come from the United Nations, which on Dec. 9 began an Internet initiative in Esmeraldas, one of Ecuador's most impoverished provinces. The project will be run by workers from the United Nations Volunteers and financed by the Ecuadorean government, the World Bank and Japan's International Cooperation Agency, offering "one-stop offices" where fishermen, artisans and other small-business owners can use the Web to find new markets.]

Ecuador's government is also trying to create a hospitable environment for online businesses. In April, the legislature approved a bill giving electronic documents the same legal status as paper documents and making digital theft a crime.

Still, Ecuador's politics, economy and geography have proven formidable barriers to Internet access. The most ominous threats are political instability and corruption.

The connectivity program was the brainchild of President Gustavo Noboa's administration. But the program's fate belongs to President-elect Lucio Gutiérrez, who takes office Jan. 15. Mr. Gutiérrez, a military coup leader who will become Ecuador's sixth president in six years, did not mention technology or Internet access in his campaign.

Even if the program survives, some dismiss it as a potential hotbed of bribery.