President George Bush on Thursday night started a five-nation tour of Latin America in an effort to salvage Washington’s reputation in the region and counter the influence of Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chávez.
Violent clashes were taking place between police and masked protesters in the financial centre of São Paulo, the president’s first stop. Rioters threw rocks at police who answered with rubber bullets and tear gas bombs. Bystanders fled the smoke-filled streets outside the art museum as running battles erupted. Several loud explosions shook the area.
Earlier protesters in Brazil signalled widespread hostility to the US leader by briefly shutting down an iron mine, invading an ethanol distillery, occupying a bank and unfurling a banner in parliament.
A massive security effort will mobilise about 4 000 police officers and soldiers as Bush’s cavalcade of 60 vehicles drives through the sprawling metropolis.
Further protests will be led by Chávez, who is scheduled to address a rally at a stadium in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital, just 48km from a ranch in Uruguay where Bush is due to meet Uruguay’s President, Tabaré Vázquez.
The six-day tour is a belated response to the region’s ”pink tide” of left-wing governments and US Democrats’ accusations that Bush has ”lost” Latin America.
Anger over the Iraq war and rows about trade and immigration have eroded US authority in what it once considered its backyard, giving Chávez a clear run to use bulging oil revenues to court support for his brand of socialism.
To what extent protests flare across the region will be a gauge of how many share the Venezuelan leader’s view that the White House is occupied by ”the devil”.
”The trip is to remind people that we care,” Bush told CNN before his departure. ”I do worry about the fact that some say, ‘Well, the United States hasn’t paid enough attention to us,’ or ‘The United States really isn’t anything more than worried about terrorism.’ And when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.”
His meeting with the Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will discuss cooperation in development of ethanol, an alternative fuel, and in Uruguay there will be talk of a trade deal with the US.
The third stop, Colombia, will focus on President Alvaro Uribe’s anti-drug efforts, a campaign that endears him to the US.
In Guatemala, Bush will thank his hosts for sending troops to Iraq, and in Mexico he will try to repair relations with President Felipe Calderón, who was alienated by his immigration policy.
Bush will also tout the dispatch to the region of a navy medical ship to treat 85 000 patients, in addition to providing funding for English language classes and a centre in Panama to train nurses.
Many analysts say his offerings are too little, too late. ”There is very little that the president has to give beyond his presence,” Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thinktank, told Cox News. ”Our foreign aid assistance packages have all been cut to the region with the exception of our counter-narcotics programme.” – Guardian Unlimited Â