San Diego Union Tribune November 8, 2005 Mistrust of Bush may hurt U.S. aims in Latin America Five-day swing raises questions By Finlay Lewis COPLEY NEWS SERVICE ANALYSIS PANAMA CITY, Panama – President Bush concluded a five-day swing through Latin America yesterday, leaving behind nagging questions about whether his unpopularity there is undercutting the U.S. agenda in the region. Even before the president flew to Argentina for the 34-nation Summit of the Americas, polls of the region showed that his trade goals were in trouble. Events during Bush's trip seemed to confirm those sentiments, most notably when a plan to restart negotiations on a hemispheric free trade agreement was scuttled at the summit. Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, said, "Any serious analysis has to say this is pretty awful that the U.S. can't even get somebody to negotiate with us." Mistrust of Bush has grown sharply, mainly because of the war in Iraq. A political scientist told Bush in Brazil that Latin Americans have been alienated by the administration's zeal to promote democracy. "There is a distancing from the United States on the whole management of the war," Hakim said. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks placed terrorism and the Middle East at the top of Bush's agenda, Latin American nations have been forging trade ties elsewhere. China in particular has made commercial inroads in the region. A survey by pollster John Zogby found that three times as many Brazilians would prefer closer ties to Europe than with the United States, while the Canadian polling firm GlobeScan recently produced a study showing the United States' closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada, would favor seeing Europe wield more influence globally than the United States. Richard Feinberg, a Latin American expert at the University of California San Diego, agreed that the Iraq war has somewhat weakened Bush's stature in the region. But Feinberg, who served as former President Clinton's national security adviser on the hemisphere, added, "Bush is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room." Analysts say that a combination of misjudgments by the administration and economic misfortune in the hemisphere combined to produce at least a temporary setback to U.S. interests. "It was a huge failure of Bush to go down without a prior agreement on a central issue that's been around for decades," Feinberg said. "How they could have let the issue get away from them is puzzling." Experts on the region point to important changes in Latin America's economies in trying to understand why the pro-trade consensus has turned negative since the first hemispheric summit in 1994 launched the trade project. One key event was the economic collapse in Argentina five years ago. Many in Argentina blamed U.S.-sponsored policies – free trade, strict controls on domestic spending, privatization, open markets – for helping trigger the collapse. »Next Story»