WELCOME TO THE LAME DUCK TOURS

by Alexander Cockburn

Even by the rushed standards of these presidential jaunts, Bush's current outing to Latin America is a pell-mell affair. First it was Brazil, still smarting from De Gaulle's crack on the way back out to the airport, that "this is not a serious country." Bush got to say hello to President Lula and visit a slum. Then it was Uruguay on Saturday, with Colombia scheduled for Sunday, Guatemala on Monday, Mexico on Tuesday. It's this kind of rushed travel that prompted Bush Sr., in his presidential jaunt around Asia, to mix too many shots of sake with his Ambien and throw up into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa.

At the time of his eructation in January 1992, Bush Sr. was entering his last year in the White House, and like most incumbents, including now his son, had felt the urge to get out of Dodge and hit the road. Few Americans study the travel brochures with more zeal than two-term presidents who face impeachment (Nixon and Clinton) or popular loathing (Johnson and Bush Jr.) or unpleasant suggestions in the press that they are senile and should be removed from office under the terms of the 25th Amendment (Eisenhower and Reagan).

Washington holds scant appeal for our current president. Vice president Dick Cheney's senior aide, Scooter Libby, has now been convicted. The hoped-for "light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq is not yet visible, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon have threatened mutiny if Bush orders them to bomb Teheran. His poll ratings are in the basement. So it was time to call up Lame Duck Tours and accept the bargain offer of a seven-day special to Latin America, meals and hotels included with a trip to the Mayan ruins on Tuesday.

Back in his 2000 campaign, Bush pledged "a fundamental commitment" to Latin America. The commitment turns out to have been one for revolutionary change. Guevara would have been proud of W. On Bush's inept watch the subcontinent has swerved left, and now the dominant leader on the continent is Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who made impertinent jokes at the UN General Assembly last year about Bush's sulphurous, hence diabolical, stench.

Thirty, even 20 years ago, Chavez would have been on the receiving end of a swift CIA-organized coup. But Uncle Sam can't even do that anymore. Chavez survived a fumbled 2002 attempt, and since then it's been downhill all the way for U.S. standing in the region. The boom in world oil prices has allowed Chavez to subsidize energy prices through Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean, and he has cemented important trade and investment agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia.

The deeper problem is that the U.S. model -- free-trade pacts, neo-liberal onslaughts on public ownership and rule by the International Monetary Fund -- simply ran out of steam at the end of the Nineties, leaving Latin America scarred by poverty, unemployment, slums and kleptocracies from Mexico City down through the southern cone. Bush is inheriting crass economic and political miscalculations that stretch back to the start of the 1970s and the decision by Nixon and Kissinger to overthrow Allende's moderate regime in Chile.

It's far too late in the day for Bush to rush south to hunker down with Uribe in Colombia, and try to cement some kind of anti-Chavez consortium with the leaders of Peru and Uruguay. Nor will the corn moguls of the North American Midwest allow Congress to OK Bush's plan to import ethanol from Brazil's sugar plantations -- one of the topics Bush is scheduled to discuss with Lula.

In fact, it's all too late, period. All that lame ducks can do is waddle round the backyard, which is what Bush is doing on his six-day jaunt.