Bush tries new tack with Latin America
The president's five-country tour will focus less on trade and more on social issues.
By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 8, 2007 edition
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WASHINGTON - With one eye on Hugo Chávez, President Bush heads off Thursday on a five-country tour of Latin America designed to display a US leadership capable of working with the region's democratic leftists – and of showing as much interest in social issues as it has in open markets.
Even as the Venezuelan president and would-be heir to Fidel Castro's mantle continues to peddle his own vision for the region with the help of his country's vast oil wealth, Mr. Bush will talk biofuels with Brazil's center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He'll venture as far south as Uruguay, to meet with another Latin leftist president, Tabaré Vásquez, before stopping in Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico.
All along the way, Bush will acknowledge the regionwide disappointment in a decade and a half of economic and political reforms by emphasizing new initiatives. They'll address poverty and lagging development – two hemispheric priorities that lost out to a US focus on trade and security.
Yet with America's image in the region at an all-time low, Bush widely seen as a lame-duck president bogged down by Iraq, and his own budget for 2008 proposing significant cuts in key social-assistance programs, many analysts wonder if the trip and new focus on the hemisphere isn't too little, too late.
"This trip marks a radical shift in the discourse of US policy, a change in the way the US talks about Latin America," says Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. Free trade and counterterrorism "have been the only two items on the agenda since 9/11," she says, "but now we see recognition of other issues at play in the region than the ones the administration has focused on."
The problem for Bush, she says, is that expectations of the US and America's image are both so low that the new emphasis is "likely to be met with widespread skepticism in the region."
Adds Sidney Weintraub, a Latin America expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: "After six-plus years of neglect, there's little the Latin Americans expect of him anymore."
This is not the way it was supposed to be. Bush came into the White House saying that as president he would "look south, not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency." This trip, an especially long one for Bush, is designed to demonstrate that he has been true to his original commitment, White House officials say.
Bush will note the expansion of free-trade agreements with the US, as well as US support for democracy's expansion in the region. But he will also unveil the new emphasis on social concerns.
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