Word: regionalization
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...little else, President Bush has learned one valuable thing about Latin America since his last visit to the region: how to duck the protests. In 2005, at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Bush was greeted by violent demonstrations and angry speeches from leftist leaders like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But the five countries Bush has chosen for his six-day Latin America tour that starts today in Sao Paulo, Brazil, are led by either kindred conservatives or more moderate leftists. And the venues he's visiting are often far from metropolis hotbeds of anti-yanqui...
...question that hovers over the trip is whether Bush and Washington have finally learned to address all that anger in their own backyard. That resentment stems from both a widespread feeling that Bush - who came to office pledging to be Latin America's mejor amigo - instead essentially abandoned the region when it refused to line up behind his Iraq invasion, and a just as pervasive belief that Washington-backed capitalist reforms have helped widen the region's gap between rich and poor, the world's worst. Add to that the U.S.'s perceived obsession with hemispheric campaigns like the drug...
...abstractions of free trade - the fruits of which too rarely trickle down in Latin America's corrupt societies - and more about targeting specific development engines that may well create decent-paying jobs. The gesture may be too little too late to repair Bush's own frayed relations with the region, but it "helps lay the groundwork for a new, more engaged approach to Latin America that tries to redress the tremendous gap between what Washington cares about and what Latin Americans worry about," says Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Washington-based think thank Inter-American Dialogue...
...same can be said for the other small but nonetheless well-calculated initiatives Bush announced before heading south this week, like a regional health-care training center and a fund to underwrite home mortgages. Advocates in the region hope those sorts of new approaches will be just the start. In Mexico, advocates for the rural poor - hundreds of thousands of whom migrate illegally to the U.S. each year to work - insist there are myriad efforts the U.S. could aid to curtail the flow at its source, inside Mexico, instead of throwing billions at building walls along the border...
...Caracas caudillo. Bush noted this week that too many Latin Americans "have seen little improvement in their daily lives, and this has led some to question the value of democracy." This tour alone can't fix that, of course. But if Bush can help diffuse some of the region's anger directed his (and Washington's) way, it would be a positive start...