How the U.S. Lost Latin America

The Dear Friend and Conscience (DF&C) spent five weeks in South and Central America recently and returned home saddened over a disaffection for the U.S. that ranged from feelings of abandonment to anger that she found nearly everywhere she went.

President Bush came to office in 2001 declaring that Latin America would be a priority, but it has been anything but. It is safe to say that five years on, relations between the U.S. and Latin American countries are the worst in years.

Notes the BBC's Gavin Esler in a news analysis:

Virtually anyone paying attention to events in Venezuela and Nicaragua in the north to Peru and Bolivia further south, plus in different ways Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, comes to the same conclusion: there is a wave of profound anti-American feeling stretching from the Texas border to the Antarctic.

And almost everyone believes it will get worse.

. . . For his part, President Bush even suggested that the United States had no more important ally than . . . wait for it . . .Mexico.

None of that survived the attacks of 9/11.

Mr Bush launched his War on Terror and re-discovered the usefulness of allies like Britain.

While Washington's attention turned to al-Qaeda, the Taleban, Iraq and now Iran, in country after county in Latin America voters chose governments of the left, sometimes the implacably "anti-gringo" left, loudly out of sympathy with George Bush's vision of the world, and reflecting a continent with the world's greatest gulf between rich and poor.

Esler notes that in Nicaragua, a young Sandinista revolutionary by the name of Daniel Ortega (see Time magazine cover) is back and may be re-elected president:

Can you imagine it? The man who survived CIA plots and Contra death squads, who relinquished power peacefully to Washington's candidate, Violeta Chamorro, sweeping back into the Nicaraguan presidency?

It will be a huge embarrassment for George Bush junior, a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with American foreign policy in the hemisphere. And guess who predicted it would go wrong? Violeta Chamorro herself.

The night before her election victory over Mr Ortega I was invited to dinner at the walled compound of Mrs Chamorro's house in Managua. She told me that Washington politicians could always find money for wars in Latin America - but rarely for peace in Latin America.