Jueves 08 de Marzo 2007. Año II, No. SESENTA Y TRES

La Secretaría General de la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) ha iniciado la coordinación del proyecto “América Latina ante la Segunda Administración Bush”.  

Como parte de este  proyecto, la Secretaría General de FLACSO ofrece otro canal de información con un resumen noticioso semanal sobre lo que se publica acerca de América Latina en algunos de los principales diarios de los Estados Unidos.  Esto permitirá identificar   cuales son los temas que despiertan mayor  interés en Estados Unidos sobre la región latinoamericana y su tratamiento en la prensa estadounidense.  Las noticias correspondientes a la semana del 02 al 08 de Marzo 2007 han sido clasificadas bajo las categorías de:

COMERCIO
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More than 800 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia over the past six years, by government count, yet the number of those murders solved can be counted on one hand.

Union organizing can be a deadly activity anywhere but is particularly dangerous in Colombia, where decades of political violence and lawlessness compel some unscrupulous employers to hire assassins.

"There's almost total impunity," claims Flavio Arias, vice president of the CUT labor umbrella organization, which represents Colombia's 530,000 unionized workers.

Now Colombia's reputation as the deadliest place in the world to be a labor organizer threatens to sink one of President Alvaro Uribe's proudest achievements: a free trade agreement with U.S. President George W. Bush, who is expected to use his visit to Colombia on March 11 to press for congressional approval.

The union-friendly Democrats who now control the U.S. Congress are so concerned about the unsolved labor murders that they are threatening to derail the trade pact entirely unless Uribe makes clear progress.

MIGRACION
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Mexican President Felipe Calderon won't be fighting for migration reform when he meets with President Bush next week. Instead, he will be be spelling out what he intends to do to keep Mexicans at home.

Calderon, who was inaugurated on Dec. 1, has pledged to take 100 actions in his first 100 days in office, many of which represent the first steps toward "curing" Mexico's long tradition of illegal migration to the U.S.

If implemented, his proposals could help transform Mexico from a labor-exporting country with relatively low growth, productivity and wages into an investment-rich, job-producing economy with better living standards for its 107 million people, nearly half of whom still live in poverty.

"We are laying the foundation for a more just, healthy society with better and more equal opportunities for all," he said.

Soaked and disoriented, two groups of Cuban migrants walked up to the Rickenbacker Causeway toll booth Monday morning, where they got coffee and blankets from strangers and waited for the Border Patrol.

But another group of migrants wasn't so lucky -- 48 Cubans the Coast Guard caught at sea recently were sent back to Bahía de Cabañas, Cuba, on Saturday. And the fate of two Cuban doctors believed to be among boatloads that the Coast Guard intercepted the past few days remains an open question.

The doctors might be among another group sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they will have to make their case to U.S. officials that they should be allowed into the United States or repatriated to a third country. Coast Guard officials would not say how many were in the group sent to Guantánamo.

Coral Gables immigration attorney Mario S. Cano said Monday that among those detained on a Coast Guard cutter last week were Sunilda Herrera-Casas and Misleidy Rodriguez-Machado, both doctors. Cano said Herrera-Casas and Rodriguez-Machado had U.S. visas, and they were detained trying to reach Florida on separate boats.

The nation's most elite colleges and universities are bolstering their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Education.

Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation's college-age black population, account for more than a quarter of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study, produced by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The large representation of black immigrants developed as schools' focus shifted from restitution for decades of excluding black Americans from campuses to embracing wider diversity, the study's authors said. The more elite the school, the more black immigrants are enrolled.

"A lot of these institutions have been promoting the increase in their black populations, but clearly this increase reflects a growth in their black immigrant populations," said Camille Z. Charles, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored the study.

TIJUANA, Mexico, Feb. 27 — Mexican authorities complained recently that American construction workers putting up a barrier on the border between Mexico and the United States had trespassed into Mexico a full 33 feet.

Promising an investigation of the diplomatic brouhaha, the American ambassador, Antonio O. Garza Jr., reassured the Mexicans, who are livid that the barrier is going up in the first place, that any improper step across the line was unintentional. “The U.S. is sensitive to Mexican concerns,” Mr. Garza said.

The accusation involved an episode in February east of here, near the Mexican border city of Agua Prieta and the Arizona town of Douglas. But it drove home a point that might be more evident in Tijuana than anywhere else: the border is a blurry one, no matter what barriers may be going up to keep people from illegally crossing it.

President Bush visits Mexico next week, and just in time. Mexico plans to be tougher on illegal crossings – not into the US, but from Central America – because too many migrants are taking Mexican jobs. In contrast, Mexico last year began to give maps to its citizens showing the safest illegal routes into the US.

No wonder many Americans have difficulty with moves in Congress to provide a "path to citizenship" for many of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the US. A bill to do just that, revised from last year's failed attempt, may be introduced in coming days. Senate leaders hope to pass it by May.

But until the US can demonstrate strong, long-term enforcement of its borders and crack down on the double crime of illegal hiring of illegal migrants, why should Congress create yet another incentive for unlawful crossings?

Perhaps during his visit Mr. Bush can persuade Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, to speed up reforms that would lift Mexico's economy and curb this embarrassing mass exodus of its citizens that only breeds more illegality. Mexico also needs to be as serious about patrolling its northern border as it is the southern one.

ADVOCATES OF sweeping measures to reform the nation's broken-down muddle of an immigration policy are preparing to enter the fray once again: A new bill may be introduced in Congress as early as this week. This time hopes are high that the political map has changed just enough to make success a real possibility. Beware: Those hopes will be realized only if everyone involved in last year's debacle has drawn the right lessons from Congress's failure to enact a meaningful law.

What are the lessons? President Bush, who favored last year's Senate bill but went limp when it came under attack by anti-reform forces in the House, should note that passivity in the face of his own party's hard-liners is a prescription for further disappointment. Republican leaders in the House, who killed last year's legislation, should conclude that they gained nothing by trying to whip up the party base with misleading talk of an "amnesty" for illegal immigrants -- and probably alienated droves of coveted Hispanic voters at the elections in November.

As for Democrats, who have squabbled among themselves but now run Congress, they must take note of an opportunity staring them in the face. They have a chance to exercise leadership and score a victory on a major domestic policy problem.

The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted 33 Cuban migrants in the Florida Straits this week on a boat headed for South Florida.

Officials are holding the group aboard a cutter, including a doctor with a U.S. visa, while the Bush administration decides what to do.

After the boat was stopped Tuesday, the Coast Guard brought one of the migrants to Key West because she needed emergency medical treatment related to a kidney illness.

The other 32, including the doctor, remained aboard the cutter.

The case was the latest involving Cuban migrants interdicted at sea under the controversial wet-foot/dry-foot policy.

Under the policy, Cuban migrants stopped at sea are generally repatriated while those who make it to U.S. soil are allowed to stay.

Según cifras gubernamentales, el inglés es segundo idioma para aproximadamente 5.5 millones de estudiantes en Estados Unidos, lo que representa casi una décima parte del total del estudiantado. Más aún, se espera que para el año 2025, uno de cada cuatro estudiantes en el sistema de escuelas públicas de este país tenga inicialmente un limitado manejo del inglés.

La Oficina estadounidense del Censo ubica en esa categoría a cualquier persona entre los 5 y 21 años de edad que hable otro idioma distinto al inglés en casa y diga hablar inglés pero no "muy bien." Bajo la Ley del 2002 destinada a que Ningún Niño se Quede Atrás, se responsabiliza a las escuelas por estos estudiantes y por la rapidez y la eficacia con que lleguen a dominar el inglés.

En muchos aspectos, las cifras oficiales reflejan los niveles récord de inmigración durante los últimos 15 años, que han cambiado dramáticamente la composición demográfica en las escuelas públicas estadounidenses. Teniendo en cuenta que la mayoría de dichos inmigrantes vienen de países donde el inglés no es el idioma materno, parecería obvio asumir que aquellos estudiantes que tienen dificultades con inglés son niños que han llegado recientemente a este país.

POLÍTICA INTERNA
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THE TOWN’S BIGGEST EVENT SINCE THE BANANA FEVER ENDED
The New York Times
March 7, 2007

ARACATACA, Colombia, March 6 — Long gone are the expatriate managers of the United Fruit Company, which made Aracataca into a thriving company town in Colombia’s banana-growing region in the early 20th century. Gone, too, are the Gypsies who would pitch their tents on the edge of town to sell contraptions like telescopes and false teeth.

But the most painful absence on Tuesday was that of Gabriel García Márquez, the native son for whom Aracataca was the inspiration for Macondo, the fictional setting for his epic novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Still, that did not keep Aracataca from celebrating Mr. García Márquez’s 80th birthday, which was Tuesday, with a military parade, a special Roman Catholic Mass and 80 fireworks set off at 5 a.m.

Former governor and federal lawmaker Beatríz Paredes has assumed leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which in the span of a decade sank from Mexico's greatest political force to third-place finisher in last year's presidential election.

Paredes on Sunday took over a party that still holds a majority of local and state offices but is fractured by competing interest groups and politicians, and broad discontent among its formerly loyal base, Mexico's 50 million poor.

GOAL

Paredes, 53, said in an interview that she would lead a new, more democratic PRI, the initials the party is known by. She said she wanted to steer the PRI to the left, where presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party mined votes to come within a hair of winning the July election.

''You can't judge the PRI of the past against the PRI of today,'' she said. ``My objective is to build a PRI of the 21st century.''

THE SHORT ROAD FROM HOSTAGE TO ENVOY
The Washington Post
March 6, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 5 -- Just weeks ago, Fernando Araújo's only connection to the outside world was his shortwave radio. In six years as a hostage of Marxist rebels, his life had been reduced to a grim routine of forced marches, a diet of soggy beans and rice and the realization that freedom might never come.

Now, after a confused and miraculous dash to freedom that has captivated Colombians, Araújo has become foreign minister, a critical post in a country highly dependent on foreign aid, especially from Washington. When President Bush arrives here on Sunday to meet with President Álvaro Uribe, he will also meet a man who is a potent symbol for the hundreds of hostages, including three Americans, still in rebel hands.

"I'm not a symbol of kidnapping," Araújo explained. "I'm a symbol of liberty."

In the two months since his escape, Araújo has scrambled to catch up with a world of new technology and shifting geopolitics. He has learned about iPods, and that cellphones take pictures. He has marveled that Google Earth displays the mountains where he was held. He has also gone through emotional lows.

GUATEMALAN POLICE PURGE ORDERED
The Miami Herald
Mar. 06, 2007

Guatemala's president on Tuesday ordered the national police to clean out corrupt officers and upgrade training after six members of the force were accused of killing three Central American Parliament members.

President Oscar Berger gave the Interior Ministry 15 days to come up with rules that would make it easier to fire policemen accused of crimes. Authorities have complained that judges often reinstate dismissed officers under existing laws.

Berger said he was acting because "members of the National Civil Police appear to have been involved in acts that affect the prestige of the institution."

Members of Guatemala's police, military and justice systems have been bought off by traffickers who use the country as a way station for Colombian drug shipments to the U.S.

The FBI last week sent several agents to help discover who ordered six police officers to murder three Salvadoran members of the Central American Parliament and their driver on Feb. 19.

Venezuela's Communist Party affirmed Monday its commitment to the Marxist ideals espoused by President Hugo Chávez but resisted the leftist leader's proposal to disband and join a single, revolutionary party.

Communists will not consider relinquishing their 76-year history as an independent party until the ideological foundation of the future ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has been clearly defined, said Oscar Figueras, Secretary General of Venezuela's Communist Party, or PCV.

''After the character of this organization is defined, the political parties will make decisions'' regarding their own future, Figuera said at the party headquarters in Caracas, where portraits of communist icons Vladimir Lenin and Ho Chi Minh hang on the walls. ``It cannot occur beforehand.''

Chávez has already disbanded his own party, the Fifth Republic Movement, to make way for the forthcoming political organization, which is to replace a long list of pro-Chávez parties.

Flying Communist Party flags and blasting rap music, hundreds of sandaled, dreadlocked students marched along Rio de Janeiro's bay shore on a recent afternoon toward a parking lot they'd dreamed about for years.

It was there that the socialism-preaching National Student Union once ran its headquarters out of a four-story building it took over from suspected Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

When Brazil's military seized power in 1964, its first act was to strafe and set fire to the building, which had been a center of anti-military activism. The charred remains stood abandoned until they were razed in 1980.

For generations of student union members, the third-of-an-acre parcel represented an injustice long unresolved. On Feb. 1, a crowd of students rushed in to build a tent city amid the parked cars and vowed never to leave.

Such lofty ambitions, however, have run into a uniquely Brazilian roadblock: the country's complicated system of squatters rights and property laws, which allow people to live on and even own land they haven't paid for if they've been there long enough.

EL ALTO, Bolivia -- The women attending Esperanza Mitta's community meetings moved here from tiny mountain villages and worn-out mining towns, and now they are fashioning a modern metropolis out of whatever they have in hand.

Toilet paper serves as decorative bunting on the walls of their meeting hall. A rocky vacant lot, surrounded by several leafless trees, serves as their "central plaza." A nearby soccer goal, recently used by neighborhood vigilantes to hang a thief, is considered a local law enforcement tool.

For all the ways they have changed this city, though, the women have altered their own lives even more.

"We don't have educations, so we get together and talk about how we can teach ourselves skills," said Mitta, 51. "A lot of the women just need to work out some of the fears that they have about living in a city, and they all do it, little by little."

For the first time in the world's history, more people next year will live in cities than in rural areas, according to U.N. population experts. Women are leading the urban push, leaving the countryside at higher rates than men, lured in large part by domestic service jobs. They tend to gravitate to places like this: a sprawling expanse in a developing nation struggling to provide basic infrastructure.

CHÁVEZ'S OIL LARGESSE WINNING FANS ABROAD
The Christian Csience Monitor
March 5, 2007

MEXICO CITY AND LONDON - The London bus has come to symbolize many things over the years. It's a national icon, a picture postcard paragon of public transport, a byword for frustration and irregularity.

But a harbinger of international socialism? Far-fetched perhaps, but less so after the latest move by Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez to offer cut-rate fuel so that 250,000 Londoners on welfare can travel half-price throughout one of the world's most expensive cities.

The double-decker trademark isn't the only trace of Mr. Chávez's so-called "21st century socialism:" For the past year residents in New York, Boston, and other major US cities have scored cheaper heating bills, thanks to Venezuela. Chávez has also sent cheap oil to Cuba, Nicaragua, and more than a dozen other countries.

His offerings go beyond oil and have been announced with particular frenzy since he won a third term in December, promising $500 million in financing for Ecuador, $135 million for a dairy cooperative in Argentina, and a development plan in Nicaragua that includes generators to ease blackouts as well as a new development bank.

IN GUATEMALA, OFFICERS’ KILLINGS ECHO DIRTY WAR
The New York Times
March 5, 2007

GUATEMALA CITY, March 3 — After three Salvadoran congressmen were waylaid and killed on a road in Guatemala last month, it did not take the authorities long to find the culprits: they were Guatemalan police officers, and their unmarked police car had a tracking device that proved they were at the scene.

They quickly confessed, saying they thought their victims were drug dealers, and were sent to a maximum-security prison.

It is a measure of the weakness of the crime-plagued Guatemalan state that what happened just four days later remains something of a mystery — aside from the indisputable fact that the four who confessed ended up dead.

The police and the interior minister say that rioting gang members inside the prison shot and stabbed them. But other inmates and their visitors that day say a group of heavily armed men in military garb and ski masks made their way through seven locked doors and executed them, with no interference from guards, removing any possibility that they could identify co-conspirators.

ARGENTINA MAY SEE SHARED CUSTODY OF ITS TOP JOB
The New York Times
March 3, 2007

BUENOS AIRES, Feb. 28 — In political circles here, a single question is being asked incessantly these days: him or her? Will President Néstor Kirchner run for a second term or will he, as seems increasingly likely, step aside and let his wife, Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, become the Peronist candidate?

It would be highly unusual for a head of state in a situation as favorable as Mr. Kirchner’s to voluntarily relinquish office. The Argentine economy has grown by 8 percent or more every year since he took power in 2003, and largely as a result, two-thirds of Argentines approve of his job performance.

But the Kirchners seem to be playing for stakes much bigger than just the Oct. 28 election and the next four years, political analysts argue. Rather, their objective is said to be to take turns in office for at least the next dozen years.

Seizures of illegal drugs in Cuba dropped to 1.7 tons last year, the lowest amount in 11 years and proof, the Cuban government says, that its tough stance on narco-traffickers has largely kept them off the island.

Last year's drug seizures were almost four times lower than 2003, when 6.5 tons of cocaine and marijuana were seized and an interagency antinarcotics effort dubbed ''Operation Hatchet III'' was launched, the Granma newspaper reported Friday.

Last year, Cuban authorities spotted 24 boats and nine flights carrying drugs, the paper said, adding that 564 kilos of marijuana and 102 kilos of cocaine were found in 97 different cases. Eleven flights have been spotted so far this year.

ENVOY WARNS CHAVEZ ABOUT OIL TAKEOVER
Opinion
The Miami Herald
Mar. 03, 2007
By Alexandra Olson

A top U.S. diplomat warned Friday that Venezuela cannot afford to drive away the major oil companies affected by President Hugo Chavez's decision to takeover the nation's most promising oil-producing operations.

Chavez decreed this week that his government would take a minimum 60 percent stake in projects run by four companies in Venezuela's Orinoco River region - his latest nationalization move as he steers the country toward socialism.

Industry experts have questioned whether state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, has the money and capacity to take on the complex, heavy-oil upgrading projects. They are run by British Petroleum PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Total SA and Statoil ASA.

"Venezuela opened its energy section in the 1990s because it didn't have the capital or the technology to exploit its deep wells and its heavy oil, especially in the Orinoco," said Thomas A. Shannon, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. "If it's the intention of Venezuela to have a top of the line industry, then maintaining partnership with these companies is going to be essential."

Five Cuban dissidents arrested 19 months ago and held without trial ever since finally got their day in court -- and two-year prison sentences.

Emilio Leyva Pérez, Manuel Pérez Soria, Lázaro Alonso Román and René Montes de Oca Martija were sentenced to two years in prison. Independent journalist Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, a correspondent of the Miami-based Payo Libre and Nueva Prensa Cubana news agencies, was sentenced to 22 months.

Their sentences were announced Monday.

They were arrested July 13, 2005, after attending a protest to commemorate the 1994 deaths of 41 people who drowned when the Cuban Coast Guard rammed the tugboat in which they were trying to flee the island.

The ceremony was disrupted by up to 5,000 counter-protesters. In the melee that followed, up to a dozen people were arrested and several were injured.

''They got very long sentences, considering they are innocent,'' said Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. ``The victims wound up the accused.''

RELACIONES BILATERALES
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He was a strapping and fearless reporter for the Tampa Tribune who wanted to earn his stripes as a foreign correspondent.

So Todd Smith headed to the drug-trafficking hub of Uchiza and wound up photographing the small planes loaded with semi-refined cocaine bound for Colombia.

Smith did not leave Uchiza alive. His body, tortured and with a sign saying he was a U.S. agent, was found in an Uchiza playground on Nov. 21, 1989. He was 28. He is the only U.S. journalist killed while covering Peru's drug trade.

But his story remains alive.

Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, while visiting Peru on Feb. 22, asked President Alán García to reopen the investigation because the man believed by some authorities to have ordered Smith's execution, Fernando Zevallos, has never been charged with the crime.

''I told President García that it was important to me because we need to give closure to the parents of Todd Smith,'' Nelson said in an interview.

CARACAS, Venezuela, March 6 — The plot would seem to come right out of a novel in which the reader does not know whom to believe.

A group of investors from Columbus, Ohio, spends $100 million in 2004 to buy zero-coupon bonds — debt that pays interest at maturity — from a Venezuelan state bank that went bankrupt in the 1980s. A few months earlier, in October 2003, Venezuela’s solicitor general ruled that the bonds were valid. But when the investor group tried to redeem the debt, it could not, and learned only later that the solicitor general had reversed herself in December 2003.

That is the basic story line in an international financial dispute that is playing out in Federal District Court for Southern Ohio. The investor group, Skye Ventures, is suing Venezuela for its refusal to honor the bonds, which it says are now worth as much as $1 billion.

The dispute over the bonds, which bear the name of an extinct state agricultural development bank, the Banco de Desarrollo Agropecuario, or Bandagro, has not recently been discussed in public by the government of Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez rarely lets any issue involving the United States pass. ''

WASHINGTON - Rep. Albio Sires gets personal when he asks fellow lawmakers to reject efforts to ease economic sanctions against his native Cuba. ''I just tell them about my story,'' says the New Jersey Democrat.

Sires, who spent the first 11 years of his life in the town of Bejucal near Havana, tells them how, after Fidel Castro took over, English-language books were burned and he was forced to march in parades toting a Czech-made submachine gun.

Sires' pitch is growing all the more important as opponents of U.S. sanctions on Cuba are stepping up their efforts to ease them, hoping that with Fidel Castro ailing and Democrats running Congress, their chances of victory will improve.

Keep the sanctions in place until the Castro government makes significant political and human-rights reforms, Sires tells his fellow Congress members.

CHAVEZ CALLS ENVOY 'PROFESSIONAL KILLER'
The Miami Herald
Mar. 04, 2007

President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said he believes enemies including the CIA are out to kill him, and called U.S. diplomat John Negroponte a "professional killer."

Chavez said Venezuelan officials have intelligence that associates of jailed Cuban anti-communist militant Luis Posada Carriles also are involved in plotting to assassinate him.

He said the death plot idea has "gained weight" due to various factors, including the recent appointment of Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Who did they swear in ... there at the White House as deputy secretary of state? A professional killer: John Negroponte," Chavez said.

Chavez did not elaborate, but his government has previously accused Negroponte of playing a key role in the Contra war against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua when he served as ambassador to Honduras - a haven for clandestine Contra bases - from 1981 to 1985.

U.S. AND BRAZIL SEEK TO PROMOTE ETHANOL IN WEST
The New York Times
March 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 2 — President Bush, hoping to reduce demand for oil in the Western Hemisphere, is preparing to finish an agreement with Brazil next week to promote the production and use of ethanol throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, according to administration officials.

The agreement could lead to substantial growth in the ethanol industry in Brazil as technology and manufacturing equipment developed there is exported to other countries in the region.

Much of the ethanol produced there is made from sugar cane and is far cheaper to produce than the corn-based ethanol that has been nurtured by protective tariffs and government mandates in the United States.

But the agreement has already begun to prompt complaints from politicians from corn-producing regions of the United States. They fear that the plan would lead to an increase in imports of cheap foreign ethanol and undercut American producers.

WASHINGTON - In its harshest assessment yet of drug trafficking in Venezuela, the State Department Thursday said the country is turning into a haven for smugglers because of corruption and the government's refusal to cooperate with other nations.

The department's 2007 International Narcotics Control Strategies Report also expressed uneasiness with Bolivia's efforts to expand the cultivation of coca, the raw material for making cocaine. A senior department official also offered rare praise for Cuba for deporting a Colombian trafficker.

Venezuela is ''one of the principal drug-transit countries in the Western Hemisphere,'' the report said, with Colombian traffickers setting up shop there because the Chávez government is ``permissive and corrupt.''

The discovery of oil in the Florida Straits and near the Cuban shoreline -- potentially billions of barrels of reserves -- has boosted Cuba's energy prospects and drawn the attention of the U.S. oil industry.

Now, a small Canadian energy company, Sherritt International, says it plans to export Cuban oil for the first time -- a move that could put the crude on a collision course with the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

Details are few, but questions about the move go to the heart of the embargo: Where will the oil be refined? And how could Sherritt International or subsequent handlers keep the Cuban crude out of fuel being exported to the United States?

The issues rise as the oil and gas industry turns its gaze to the prospect of oil drilling off Cuba -- currently forbidden fruit for U.S. companies.

REGIONAL
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LATIN AMERICA'S TURN
President Bush still has a chance to deliver on his promise to strengthen U.S. alliances.
EDITORIAL
The Washington Post
March 7, 2007

PRESIDENT BUSH'S tour of Latin America beginning tomorrow will be shadowed by Hugo Chávez, in more ways than one. On Friday, when Mr. Bush is to visit Uruguay, the Venezuelan president will appear at a mass rally across the Plate River in Argentina, where he will try to drown out his American rival. Mr. Chávez has paid well for his Buenos Aires soapbox: He has used Venezuela's petrodollars to buy $1.5 billion in Argentine debt, allowing leftist president Néstor Kirchner to steer clear of the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Bush seems to understand that to confront Mr. Chávez, in words or otherwise, would be to provide him with the U.S. enemy he craves. When it goes unanswered, the Venezuelan's rhetoric tends to boomerang: Polls show that Mr. Chávez's popularity rating in Latin America is just as low as Mr. Bush's. Mr. Bush's duty is to demonstrate that those who choose alliance with the United States and the democratic world benefit more than Venezuela's motley collection of allies, headed by Cuba and Iran.

The president took a step in that direction on Monday by delivering a speech in which he announced several new aid initiatives on top of the $1.7 billion already budgeted for the region. A military hospital ship will tour the Caribbean, countering the Cuban doctors who shuttle around the region at Venezuela's expense. More scholarships will be offered to needy students to study in the United States, and housing assistance programs will be beefed up. Those are positive but modest steps. What's also needed are major U.S. initiatives to strengthen relations with the largest and most important Latin American countries: Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.

To judge from his latest comments, President Bush understands what he is up against as he departs for Latin America this week. People are increasingly skeptical about the virtues of the free market and lured by the choleric anti-Americanism of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Bush's job is to clear the air. He must put U.S. policy squarely in the corner of the have-nots who have failed to benefit from free-market reforms and make it clear that Mr. Chávez's warmed-over socialism is a dead end.

Reforms fell short

The common feature of the political storms rumbling across Latin America is the demand for inclusion by people who are left out. The free-market reforms embodied by the so-called ''Washington consensus'' that prevailed when Mr. Bush took office in 2001 wiped out chronic hyperinflation, expanded trade and created jobs by attracting investment and letting private business flourish.

Venezuela and its demagogic president, Hugo Chávez, won’t get a visit from President Bush. But Mr. Chávez’s appeal will be very much on Mr. Bush’s mind when he visits Latin America over the next week.

That’s actually a healthy development.

If your taste runs to three-hour speeches, chiseling away at democracy and a world-class personality cult, Mr. Chávez is your man. But if the goal is to lift millions of people out of grinding poverty, only a major effort by the United States — the hemisphere’s biggest economy and strongest democracy — can make a serious difference. And if it takes Mr. Chávez’s demagogy to spur Washington toward more enlightened policies in the Americas, so be it.

Concern over the popularity of Fidel Castro inspired the pro-democracy, pro-development policies of the Alliance for Progress during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, one of the happier periods of inter-American relations.

MEXICO CITY -- Each stop on President Bush's upcoming swing through Latin America has its own mini-agenda: ethanol and the Doha round with Brazil; a Trade Framework Agreement in Uruguay; Plan Colombia and drug enforcement in Bogotá; immigration and security with Mexico and Guatemala. But there is an overall agenda for which this trip may well represent too little, too late: Chávez containment.

The balance of forces in the region has shifted. Not only has the leftward tilt persisted -- with electoral victories in Nicaragua and Ecuador, unprecedented near-misses in Mexico and Peru, unexpected advances in Colombia -- but the Venezuelan president's influence has expanded. Hugo Chávez has found his sea legs and assembled an impressive array of tools to seduce the region. His "21st-century socialism" is a strange blend of a state-run economy, blanket social subsidies, a perpetual presidency, government by decree, and authoritarian theory and practices, as well as endless quarrels with Washington.

Thanks to unlimited oil revenue (for now) and an endless stream of Cuban doctors, educators and security personnel -- and soon, bountiful supplies of Russian arms made in Venezuela -- the new Caribbean caudillo is on a roll. Chávez has skillfully exploited the disappointment of the region's poor with the economic reforms of the past two decades; he is (for now) delivering the goods: bare-bones health care, literacy campaigns, price controls on food staples. Chávez has extended his reach to Bolivia, where Evo Morales worships him; to Argentina, where he and his populist colleague Néstor Kirchner are preparing a massive anti-Bush rally to coincide with the American president's arrival across the bay in Montevideo; and increasingly to Ecuador and Nicaragua, through generous handouts. Guatemala and Paraguay could be next.

President Bush's week-long visit to Latin America comes at a delicate moment for U.S. relations with the region. Anti-U.S. feeling is deep and pervasive -- and insistently fanned by Washington's chief adversary, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Latin Americans have mostly lost confidence in U.S. policies and leadership. They overwhelmingly oppose U.S. actions in the Middle East and have been alienated by the insensitivity of congressional debates over migration and U.S. inflexibility on trade issues. And Washington may soon take some decisions that could make things worse.

Bush's extended trip reflects the White House's disquiet about declining U.S. influence in Latin America. Bush's presence will serve as a powerful reminder of how significant this country really is for Latin America -- as the first or second trading partner of nearly every country, the region's largest foreign investor and the source of more than $60 billion in family remittances last year. U.S. support enabled Colombia to make headway in battling insecurity and violence, and it was the United States that responded to Mexico's financial crisis.

President Bush's announcement of plans to dispatch the U.S. Navy ship Comfort on a medical mission to Latin America and the Caribbean is a project championed by the U.S. Southern Command, the Pentagon's headquarters here in Miami.

The Comfort, built in 1976, is a converted San Clemente class tanker. It has served from the Persian Gulf, during the first U.S. war in Iraq in 1991, to the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

To travel the region this summer, the Comfort will draw from a range of U.S. agencies and the military, says Southcom's spokesman, Army Col. Bill Costello.

It will assemble doctors, nurses, sailors, medics and corpsmen to ''partner with their colleagues in a dozen or so countries, which the president mentioned, and with the Department of Health and Human Services,'' he said.

He talked of grinding poverty and called it "a scandal" that democracy and capitalism have not delivered more to Latin Americans. The working poor need change, he declared. He invoked Simon Bolivar, the "great liberator," and vowed to "complete the revolution" and bring true "social justice" to the region Hugo Chávez? No, George W. Bush.

As he prepares to embark on a six-day trip to Latin America this week, the president is launching a new campaign to compete with Chávez for the region's hearts and minds, employing language mirroring the Venezuelan leader's leftist populism but rooted in traditional American conservatism. After six years of focusing elsewhere in the world, Bush in his final two years wants to convince the nation's neighbors that, as he put it yesterday, "we care."

But he faces an enormous gulf between ambition and reality, analysts say. While Bush cited John F. Kennedy's effort to help lift up the region through the Alliance for Progress, the president has limited tools at this point. He offered some modest initiatives on education, housing and health care yesterday; but the new Democratic Congress has shown no eagerness to ratify three new free-trade pacts he has brokered with the region. And many in Latin America have already rendered their judgments about Bush and are awaiting his successor.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 5 — President Bush arrives here on Thursday with an energy partnership plan to create jobs and decrease poverty and inequality, a marked shift in Washington’s priorities for Latin America aimed at countering the challenge posed by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Since 1990, when Mr. Bush’s father was in the White House, United States policy toward the region has focused on free-trade agreements and related economic measures, with a secondary emphasis on drug interdiction.

But the growing leftward and anti-American trend in regional politics, led by Mr. Chávez — who plans a countertour to coincide with Mr. Bush’s trip — has led to a modified agenda and a renewed effort to rebut complaints by Latin Americans that the president has ignored their concerns in favor of the campaign against terrorism.

Corruption, detainee abuse and deplorable prison conditions were a problem throughout much of Latin America last year, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday, singling out Venezuela and Cuba for having the worst human rights records in the region.

The U.S. government's annual survey of human rights practices was released just days before President Bush begins a five-nation tour to a region that has grown skeptical of Washington's own commitment to human rights, after allegations of abuse of U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report said that as of the end of 2006, there were at least 283 political prisoners or detainees in Cuba and 13 in Venezuela. It also condemned those countries - along with Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and others - for harsh jail conditions often caused by inadequate funding and corruption.

Barry F. Lowenkron, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, said the situation in Venezuela is worsening under President Hugo Chavez's government, which he characterized as "regressive."

The document said Venezuela had seen disappearances reportedly involving corrupt security forces, torture and abuse of detainees, as well as arbitrary arrests and detentions. Crimes often went unpunished by a "highly inefficient, sometimes corrupt" judiciary.

President Bush, laying the groundwork for an eight-day trip to Latin America that's likely to deepen the struggle for influence with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, acknowledged Monday that millions of Latin Americans remain in poverty despite U.S.-backed economic policies and free-trade agreements.

Sprinkling his speech with Spanish words and phrases, Bush announced a series of relatively modest efforts to help the region's poor, including a plan to send in U.S. military medical teams.

''The fact is that tens of millions of our brothers and sisters to the south have seen little improvement in their daily lives, and this has led some to question the value of democracy,'' he told members of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. ``The working poor of Latin America need change, and the United States of America is committed to that change.''

Convene a White House conference on the Western Hemisphere to build strong civil institutions throughout the region.

Create a partnership for Latin American youth to help them improve their English and study in the U.S.

Create a Health Care Professional Training Center in Panama that will train healthcare workers for all of Latin America.

Some statements go down in history with such a painful belly flop that one can never again quote them without thoroughly soaking them in the deceptively soothing balm of irony. Consider the words of President Bush on Sept. 5, 2001, little more than seven months into his first term. That day, Bush stood next to Mexican President Vicente Fox on the South Lawn and earnestly declared, ``The United States has no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico.''

Six days later, the World Trade Center smoldered in ruins and Washington's best-laid plans for Latin America lay asunder, thoroughly torn. Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, had tumbled from the top spot in the priority rankings all the way to practically off the list.

Fast forward to 2007. With just two years left in the beleaguered Bush administration, the White House has suddenly rediscovered Latin America. Did you know that 2007 is officially, ''The Year of Engagement with Latin America''? We can credit Washington's U-turn to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the proud standard-bearer of international leftist anti-Americanism. Chávez, however, must share the honor for turning Washington's eyes southward. Yes, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the man who truly awakened the White House from its continental slumber. If the Atomic-Bomb-or-Bust Ahmadinejad can tour Washington's backyard, as he did in January, then so can -- and must -- Bush.