BUSH TOUR LEAVES LATIN PRESS PUZZLED

by Daffodil Altan and Elena Shore

(PNS) -- As President Bush made his way through Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, columnists and editors at top papers there repeatedly asked the question, 'Why is the president visiting so late in his term?' They speculated: Is he trying to assuage the damage done to his image by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez? Was he there to say something concrete about the immigration situation in the United States, and the growing sense of anti-immigrant sentiment characterized by months of raids and a stalled comprehensive immigration plan? Although many said they knew better, they hoped something concrete -- economic or otherwise -- could come of his visit.

Newspapers carried the story of his visit on their front pages, often creating multimedia packages with photos, videos and several reports. But in the editorial pages writers seemed irritated by the hoopla and disruption caused by his motorcades. Many editors were disappointed that talks between Bush and their country's president often yielded nothing tangible when it came to their gravest concerns: immigration, trade and drug trafficking.

The first leg of Bush's trip to Uruguay, Brazil and Colombia in South America was critiqued for being a "courtesy tour" by Spanish-language newspapers in the United States. The focus of his talks in South America centered on alternative energy in Brazil, combating drug trafficking in Colombia and the future of a free trade agreement in Uruguay. But two other topics -- the U.S. immigration policy and the Iraq war -- crept up repeatedly on the pages of national newspapers and among the protesters who greeted him in every country.

An article in the March 14 edition of the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, in Rio de Janeiro, reports that analysts saw Bush's tour of Latin America as a "partial success." On the one hand, the article states, Bush agreed to support Brazilian ethanol and alternative energy. On the other, he was unable to placate the anger of millions whose lives are affected by illegal immigration. Facing a wave of unpopularity, Bush's tour was an attempt to improve his image, analysts speculated. But he was haunted during the trip by the rhetoric of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and protests in the streets of cities like Mexico City. This reflected a deep rejection of the American president, according to the report.

Chavez, who initiated a simultaneous counter-tour, spoke to throngs in Argentina, Haiti and other neighboring countries. Ironically, Chavez' anti-Bush tour has highlighted the relative success of the U.S. leader's visit to Latin America, writes Fernando Luis Egana in the Caracas online newspaper, Analitica.com. As Bush makes inroads with the governments of Brazil and Uruguay, Chavez continues to question his intentions. Even Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's plan for ethanol and alternative energy has been criticized by both Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Chavez, Egana writes, must be asking himself, "How can my imperialist arch enemy be the new best friend of my socialist co-believers?" In fact, the more Chavez protests, the better Bush seems to look, according to the article.

"It's not every day that a U.S. president makes a visit to this part of the world," an editorial in the Uruguayan newspaper Ultimas Noticias noted. For that reason it was imperative, the editors argued, that President Tabare Vazquez take advantage of the visit by pushing for concrete results in the areas of employment and investment. But another newspaper, La Republica, ran a front page story with a list of 10 reasons (among those was the war in Iraq, but not immigration) why President Bush was not welcome in Uruguay.

In Colombian newspapers, frustrated sentiments were directed at both President Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez. In a column titled, "If I Were Bush... Or At Least Uribe" in Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper, columnist Daniel Samper Pizano listed the questions he would ask President Bush. "Since Colombia is the only South American country that supported the illegal war in Iraq," he writes, "I would have asked for explanations for the torture, human rights violations and unstoppable violence that has undone the invasion." Other questions address the destruction of the environment by U.S. companies, the rate of interception of arms and drugs exported from the United States into Colombia, and why the Free Trade Agreement seems to benefit the United States more than Colombia.

Bush's visit made it clear that the only way the United States will provide aid to Colombia is through anti-drug efforts, columnist Pedro Medellin Torres writes in El Tiempo. The Uribe administration's biggest problem, he notes, is that it continues to believe in the possibility of flexibility and negotiation with the United States, when in fact there isn't any. As with Free Trade talks, the United States did not move a centimeter, he writes. "The United States' relations with Colombia, like the Free Trade Agreement, are written in stone."

As the president traveled north into Central America and Mexico, the subject of immigration in the United States took center stage. Most of the United States' 12 million undocumented immigrants are of Mexican and Central American descent.

In Guatemala, the central issues were immigration (10 percent of Guatemala's GDP comes in the form of remittances from Guatemalans living in the United States) and drug trafficking.

Laura Bush, shown hugging and kissing young Native girls in traditional clothing, gave an exclusive interview to La Prensa Libre, commenting on how interesting and "unique" her trip there had been compared to the other countries. But some of the opinion columns and coverage in the same paper highlighted the irony of her photos with the young girls when it came to immigration policy in the United States. "For Guatemala, it is clear what Bush's politics are in the case of its migrants," writes Monzon. "As if the building of a wall were not enough, you have the raids that were conducted last Tuesday in Massachusetts, where more than 138 Guatemalans were detained and their children abandoned." When asked about the separation of the children from their parents, Laura Bush said she wasn't familiar with the case and had only just that morning learned about it from Guatemalan President Oscar Berger Perdomo.

Writing for Guatemala's Siglo Veintiuno, Edgar Rosales notes that the country was bled in resources to accommodate the president: public money was spent on security, traffic was stalled throughout the country while Bush paused for photo ops with indigenous workers and millions of dollars were lost in a day with little production. "It's too bad because this could have been a productive visit," writes Rosales, "but in the end this was a playful deference on the part of the king to his subjects -- a way to remind us that the stars indeed look downward...now [that he's gone] we're left a bit poorer and with the sensation that we sacrificed everything to receive a visitor who left us absolutely nothing...except in the red."

An editorial in La Prensa Libre pointed to the fact that talks of an anti-drug trafficking campaign are futile without the launch of a parallel campaign to discourage consumption in the United States, the largest market for drugs.

Little can be expected from Bush's visit to Mexico, writes Miguel Angel Rivera in Mexico City's La Jornada newspaper. Bush's March 13 meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon centered on immigration, but his promise of immigration reform carries little weight, Rivera writes, now that Bush is on his way out of office and no longer has a majority in Congress.

Other commentators agreed, describing Bush's visit with Calderon as a meeting between a weak American president on his way out and a new Mexican president seeking greater power. "One man has his days numbered, and the other has only been in office for a little over 100 days," write La Jornada reporters Claudia Herrera and Jose Antonio Roman Enviados. The meeting was polite, they write, but lacked the confidence and familiarity of meetings between the "two cowboys," President Bush and former Mexican President Vicente Fox.

Some thought Danilo Arbilla asked the right question when in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, he wondered which credentials Bush could show for his time as president -- the war in Iraq, the violations of the human rights in that war, or the violations of the rights of the American people.

As the president completed his visit, Fernando Rivera, writing in Mexico City's La Cronica, characterized Bush's visit in the form of a Mayan myth, writing, "...in the end Popol Bush will board his winged ship and leave, never to return. His cycle on the American continent, which he abandoned when he decided to bomb the Middle East, will be complete, and he will discover that it is farther from him than ever."