[aheald]

Not just South America - Telstra in Australia has dumped CDMA in favour of a one network standard - HSDPA/GSM based. Telstra is a rare beast in that it ran both GSM & CDMA networks in Australia (both the biggest geographically). Customer number are relatively low compared to the rest of the world (around 12 million last time I looked) but make for an interesting analysis. GSM has all the best devices - the CDMA phones are like "70's brown". Rarely have we encountered a decent CDMA handset - the only standout of course was a windows mobile based device - the i-mate PDA2K EVDO. The recent models like the Samsung and the Palm 700w did not appear here. And SIM cards make it so much easier to switch phones when you need to. But CDMA is renowned for brilliant coverage which is very important in rural Australia and super fast data speeds on EVDO. So now that the GSM camp can roll out HSPDA (W-CDMA based) on the 850 band, similar to what Cingular are doing, CDMA's relevance in Australia has disappeared overnight.
CDMA is a great air-interface, but the CDMA-2000 standard (IS-95B et al) is based on AMPS technology, which is just getting a bit tired. I think it will be inevitable from a technological stand point which technology will succeed, I just question whether blind allegiance to the US flag will inhibit support for a European technology...