Pubdate: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 Source: State, The (SC) Copyright: 2002 The State Contact: http://www.thestate.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/426 Author: Kevin G. Hall U.S. IS PREOCCUPIED AS LATIN AMERICA ERUPTS RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - With the United States focused on the war against terrorism, long-simmering problems in Latin America have boiled over. Those woes could force President Bush to pay the sort of attention to America's closest neighbors that he promised during the presidential election campaign. . Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, has erupted into open warfare against Marxist rebels who are deeply involved in the drug trade. Government troops have started retaking by force a swath of the country that was ceded to the rebels in a December 1998 bid for peace. . Argentina is in a state of near-collapse and has defaulted on more than $141 billion of government debt that it owes to investors in the United States and elsewhere. . Oil-rich Venezuela, the third-largest supplier of crude oil to the United States, is close to anarchy, with army officers rebelling against leftist President Hugo Chavez, the CIA and State Department warn. . Even in Brazil and Bolivia, countries that are following the Washington blueprint for economic reform, anti-Washington presidential candidates lead opinion polls. Many experts on the region think U.S. inattention comes at a big price. "If there is one lesson one can walk away with from Sept. 11, it is when the U.S. is distracted, it is not very good for Latin America," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research center on the Americas. Bush To Visit Peru Hopes rose in Latin America in 1994, when President Bill Clinton held the Summit of the Americas in Miami and elected leaders from the region pledged to create a hemisphere-wide free-trade zone by 2005. Yet Clinton's attention faded. For most of his second term, the chief policy adviser for Latin America -- the assistant secretary of state for the region -- was never formally appointed. It took President Bush a year to get Otto Reich approved as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. There was no ambassador to Brazil, Latin America's largest country, for Bush's first year in office. One finally will arrive in April. The absence of a clear policy leader for Latin America has left many governments in the region adrift, said Stephen Johnson, a Latin America policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center in Washington. "There has to be a fence post against which countries developing their markets and democracies can lean," said Johnson. In decades past, Latin American nations looked to Washington for aid. Now they are asking for trade, in the form of preferential market access like Mexico enjoys under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Access to the U.S. market gives countries the incentive to sign on to the market reforms that America demands and to turn away from producing illicit drugs. The presidents of Peru, Colombia and Bolivia are expected to push for trade concessions when they meet Bush in the Peruvian capital of Lima on March 23. It will be the first visit to the poor Andean nation by a U.S. president, and the Andean nations will seek trade preferences to offset the income their citizens are losing by not cultivating coca, the plant from which cocaine is made. "The presence of Bush in Lima on March 23 is a great opportunity" to press for a new agenda, said Harold Forsyth, Peru's ambassador to Colombia. Increasing U.S. Role in Colombia Colombia itself could force the entire region back onto Washington's radar screen. Its civil war threatens to spill refugees and drug production into neighboring countries Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Panama and Peru. In early February, the Bush administration announced it wanted to provide almost $100 million to train and arm a brigade of the Colombian army to protect a pipeline that moves gas to a Caribbean Sea port for export to the United States. Colombian President Andres Pastrana also has asked the Bush administration to lift a stipulation in the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia aid effort that restricts the use of U.S. military hardware to anti-drug efforts. The Bush administration is broadening intelligence sharing with the Colombian government and speeding up the delivery of replacement parts for Black Hawk and Huey helicopters. The increasing U.S. involvement in Colombia's conflict makes some Latin Americans nervous, remembering decades of U.S. meddling and covert action during the Cold War era. The United States has promised that combat troops will not be directly involved in Colombia, but the advisers, military hardware and intelligence raise questions about where anti-narcotics efforts end and prohibited counter-insurgency involvement begins. "Everybody knows that in Colombia it is very, very difficult to draw that line of distinction," said the Brazilian official, who was understanding of the Bush administration's quandary. "You know how sensitive public opinion is in Latin American countries to an American military presence in the region." The Bush administration appears willing to take any heat for a higher profile in Colombia. U.S. military officers accompanied Pastrana on a tour late mast month of the former safe haven of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. "There is going to be an attempt to sell a broader presence than we now have in Colombia," predicted Coletta Youngers, senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights lobby in the capital. "That is going to be spark tremendous debate." - --- MAP posted-by: Josh