Bush Visits Neighbors No Longer So Friendly

MONTERREY, Mexico —  Three months after taking office, a deferential President Bush made his debut on the world stage by embracing -- and charming -- Latin America.

“I grew up in a world where if you treat your neighbor well, it’s a good start to developing a wholesome community,” he told his 33 counterparts at the Summit of the Americas.

Three years later, Bush is deeply unpopular in much of the region. Latin Americans view him as a distant neighbor at best -- often at odds with them over security and trade policies, and aloof from their worst economic and political crises.

When he arrives in Monterrey today for his second Summit of the Americas, Bush will meet a Latin American leadership that has shifted to the left and grown increasingly assertive with Washington as people across the region lose faith in free markets.

In the eyes of his neighbors, Bush embodies both impulses of the northern colossus that, alternately through history, has bullied and ignored them. Except for confronting its leaders with a with-us-or-against-us attitude on Iraq, he has made Latin America, “at least in terms of U.S. attention, an Atlantis, a lost continent,” said Jorge Castaneda, who was Mexico’s foreign minister until a year ago.

The two-day summit here “is the second coming out of George Bush in Latin America, an opportunity for reengagement,” said Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based forum for hemisphere leaders. “Will he be pushing them to demonstrate their loyalty, support for the U.S.? Will he try to reconnect with the region, to show a commitment there?”

Although Latin America is not a global power center, the stakes are high enough.

A popular backlash is growing after a decade of U.S.-backed reforms that have sold off state enterprises and opened markets to foreign competition, benefiting corrupt officials and the wealthy but doing little for the 220 million people -- nearly half Latin America’s population -- who are poor. The number of jobless has more than doubled in 10 years. In every country but Chile, per-capita income has shrunk.

Latin American leaders warn that the transformation of the 1980s, when military regimes long dominant in the region gave way to elected civilians, is at risk because people blame democracy for economic malaise. Violent popular uprisings and one military coup over the last five years have toppled elected leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.

It was a sense that events were spinning out of control that prompted Canada to call for this week’s extraordinary meeting. The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 as a forum to promote the hemisphere’s most ambitious project: a free trade zone from Alaska to Argentina. The region’s leaders met again in 1998 and 2001. The next summit was set for 2005, but concern arose that Argentina, the assigned host, was too crippled by its financial meltdown to pull it off.

Brazil, which has clashed with the Bush administration over terms of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas accord, moved to block formal discussion of the issue this week by refusing to attend the summit if trade were on the table.

Bush will come with an anti-poverty agenda that fits into the meeting’s limited scope. He will urge the summit to set “practical goals that can rapidly improve the daily lives of people in the region,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week.

The president’s “tough love” message, U.S. officials say, is this: Latin America’s problems are political, not economic, and there is little Washington can do if its neighbors fail to strengthen the rule of law and property rights, stop corruption, invest more in education and lift bureaucratic obstacles to starting small businesses. Democratic countries that progress in these areas, he is expected to emphasize, can compete for a share of $5 billion in Millennium Challenge Account grants under a U.S. aid program.

Bush’s political advisors see a payoff at home. Coupled with his proposal last week to normalize the status of illegal immigrant workers in the United States, which would mainly benefit Mexicans, the president’s election-year pitch to Latin America as a whole could play well with Latino voters.

It remains to be seen how the Bush message will play here.

Miguel Diaz, a South American specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the administration seems “more open-minded on what needs to be done” to stimulate the region’s economy.

Bush’s critics argue that the United States could help the region a lot more by reducing farm subsidies that inhibit Latin American exports. The broad perception that the U.S. leader is pursuing “cowboy diplomacy” in Iraq and elsewhere generates suspicion in the region about whatever he says.

Indeed, a survey in November by Zogby International showed that 87% of the region’s opinion-makers rated Bush negatively. Other polls show a surge of anti-U.S. sentiment for the first time in years, with 53% of Latin Americans recently surveyed by Latinobarometro, a Chilean polling firm, saying they hold a favorable view of the United States, down from 67% in 2000.

These attitudes help explain the rise of left-leaning politicians in the region, including Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador -- all elected since Bush took office. Not since the 1960s, when the United States got Communist Cuba suspended from the Organization of American States -- that is why Cuban leader Fidel Castro is not invited here this week -- has Latin America tilted so far left.

“We have to stop being a doormat,” Kirchner told reporters last week, reacting to U.S. criticism of Argentina’s warming ties with Cuba. He boasted that he would “win by a knockout” in talks with Bush in Monterrey.

Things looked friendlier three years ago when Bush, who speaks Spanish, began his presidency by courting Mexican President Vicente Fox. But that friendship -- and a promised overhaul of U.S. immigration laws -- was put on hold after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Latin America’s leaders then began standing up to Bush on issues that matter to him -- and taking hits. Mexico and Chile, with temporary seats on the U.N. Security Council, refused to support the war in Iraq. The Bush administration reacted by delaying approval of a bilateral free-trade pact with Chile and persuaded Fox to fire Mexico’s envoy to the United Nations.

Last week, when Washington began requiring fingerprints and photos of some foreign visitors, Brazil ordered the same treatment for U.S. visitors.

More worrisome to Latin American leaders is the price of Bush’s scant attention to Argentina’s 2001 financial collapse and the political violence that has rocked Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti and Venezuela. Only late last year did the administration step in to help Argentina clinch a deal with the International Monetary Fund to reschedule the nation’s $141-billion foreign debt.

Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, last week rejected the argument that “after 9/11 the United States lost interest in anything that didn’t relate to terrorism.”

She noted that Bush recently reached a free-trade pact with Central American nations and Chile.

But the trade deals are patchwork steps in the administration’s drive for a free-trade zone for all the Americas. That effort bogged down last year after Brazil, following a policy of “benign restraint” on U.S. dominance, insisted that Washington’s farm subsidies and steel protections be put on the table, and Washington refused.

One U.S. official said Washington hopes the more conservative Fox will assume a leadership role in the hemisphere to balance Brazil’s influence.

“Mexico is the other big boy on the block,” the official said. “But I wonder whether Mexico is comfortable out in the lead vis-a-vis their Latin American brothers, for fear that it puts them too far in the U.S. camp.”

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Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Crawford, Texas, and Hector Tobar in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.