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Bush set for a rough ride at the Americas summit

A man passes by posters which oppose US President George W. Bush's visit to Argentina to attend the Summit of the Americas on Monday in Mar del Plata. PHOTO: AFP

If US President George W. Bush is expecting some respite from his troubles at home during a four-day visit to Argentina and Brazil that begins today, he is in for a very rude awakening.

Polls show Bush to be the most unpopular US president ever among Latin Americans, and thousands of demonstrators, led by the soccer idol Diego Maradona, are flocking to the Argentine beach resort of Mar del Plata to protest his presence at a summit meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders. The greeting from his fellow heads of state, who have been complaining of his administration's neglect of the region for five years, does not promise to be especially warm, either.

"He doesn't have any money to offer, so the president doesn't really have any cards to play," said Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "Nobody among the crop of fiscally conservative but socially progressive presidents that we now have around the region is going to go to his defense."

The theme of what is formally known as the Fourth Summit of the Americas is "Creating Jobs to Fight Poverty and Strengthen Democratic Governance." But the feeling among many Latin Americans is that the US is coming with little to offer other than the usual nostrums about free trade, open markets, privatization and fiscal austerity, the same recipe of reforms that has vastly increased social inequality throughout Latin America over the past decade.

"We've almost all of us been down that road, and it didn't work," said a diplomat from one South American country, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to offend the Bush administration. "The United States continues to see things one way, but most of the rest of the hemisphere has moved on and is heading in another direction."

Even in the area of free trade, which Washington continues to offer as the solution to the region's problems, progress has slowed to a crawl. Washington recently struck such an agreement with Central American nations, but the deadline this year for a much broader hemispheric accord, set at the first summit meeting in Miami in 1994, has come and gone.

Moreover, while Latin America had one of its better economic performances last year, much of that growth came from booming sales of raw materials to China.

"The pace of free trade negotiations has slowed down," but not "the commitment to some kind of broader hemispheric agreement," Thomas Shannon, the US assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, said on Tuesday in a telephone interview from Washington.

"We don't see any dramatic stepping away" from the notion that "democracy and free markets really do deliver the goods," he added.

Latin American diplomats, however, say that negotiations over a joint text to be issued at the end of the three-day meeting have been fraught with disagreement. The Bush administration and Canada have been pushing for a resounding endorsement of the free-trade message. But Latin America, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez particularly scathing in his condemnations has been resisting.

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No escape for unpopular Bush

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