RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 1 - If George W. Bush is expecting some respite from his troubles at home during a four-day visit to Argentina and Brazil that begins Thursday, he is in for a very rude awakening.
Polls show Mr. Bush to be the most unpopular American 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 and indifference to 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 United States is coming with little to offer other than the usual nostrums about free trade, open markets, privatization and fiscal austerity, the same recipe that has vastly increased social inequality throughout Latin America during 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 2005 deadline for a much broader hemispheric accord, set at the first summit meeting in Miami in 1994, has now 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, not trade with the United States.
So the president is facing dropping poll numbers regarding his job performance here, an embloldened Democratic Party with Harry Reid forcing the Republicans to start investigating the White House connection with the intelligence failings regarding Iraq's WMDs, a deteriorating war in Iraq, and now he can't go overseas to other countries without facing mounting opposition and protests to his agenda.
Looks like the Bush agenda is right on track.
No comments:
Post a Comment