MONTERREY, Mexico — Three months after taking office, a deferential President Bush made his debut on the world stage by embracing -- and charming -- Latin America.
"I grew up in a world where if you treat your neighbor well, it's a good start to developing a wholesome community," he told his 33 counterparts at the Summit of the Americas.
Three years later, Bush is deeply unpopular in much of the region. Latin Americans view him as a distant neighbor at best -- often at odds with them over security and trade policies, and aloof from their worst economic and political crises.
When he arrives in Monterrey today for his second Summit of the Americas, Bush will meet a Latin American leadership that has shifted to the left and grown increasingly assertive with Washington as people across the region lose faith in free markets.
In the eyes of his neighbors, Bush embodies both impulses of the northern colossus that, alternately through history, has bullied and ignored them. Except for confronting its leaders with a with-us-or-against-us attitude on Iraq, he has made Latin America, "at least in terms of U.S. attention, an Atlantis, a lost continent," said Jorge Castaneda, who was Mexico's foreign minister until a year ago.
The two-day summit here "is the second coming out of George Bush in Latin America, an opportunity for reengagement," said Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based forum for hemisphere leaders. "Will he be pushing them to demonstrate their loyalty, support for the U.S.? Will he try to reconnect with the region, to show a commitment there?"
Although Latin America is not a global power center, the stakes are high enough.
A popular backlash is growing after a decade of U.S.-backed reforms that have sold off state enterprises and opened markets to foreign competition, benefiting corrupt officials and the wealthy but doing little for the 220 million people -- nearly half Latin America's population -- who are poor. The number of jobless has more than doubled in 10 years. In every country but Chile, per-capita income has shrunk.
Latin American leaders warn that the transformation of the 1980s, when military regimes long dominant in the region gave way to elected civilians, is at risk because people blame democracy for economic malaise. Violent popular uprisings and one military coup over the last five years have toppled elected leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.
