MEXICO CITY — Around the world, the irony was too deep to ignore.
In teeming Mexico City, the newspaper Ovaciones took a break from its daily diet of kidnappings and gore to splash across its front page images of an American city reduced to "starvation, refugees ... and helicopters under fire."
"Just Like Haiti!" the banner headline screamed.
From Beijing and Havana, as well as Paris and Berlin, there were offers of assistance to the most powerful nation on Earth as it struggled to cope in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Pledges of help came from more than 50 countries, including oil from Venezuela, generators from Japan and cash from Australia. Others offered boats, aircraft, medical supplies and blankets.
Even impoverished Sri Lanka made a $25,000 donation, a gesture in recognition of Americans' response to last year's tsunami.
But the expressions of sympathy were mixed with a worldwide sense of amazement and disgust at the failure of American authorities to effectively deal with the crisis.
After describing the plight of two Brazilians caught up in the fetid drama at the Louisiana Superdome in an editorial titled "Collapse," the Jornal do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro said New Orleans had been reduced to a "tribal area."
"To see homeless dying of thirst and lack of medical care in the middle of the street escapes comprehension," the paper said. "The world asks how [the Americans] were able to take food and water so quickly to remote Indonesia and cannot save New Orleans."
In Europe, some commentators saw links between the disaster and unpopular U.S. policies in Iraq. Germany's environment minister associated the catastrophe with the Bush administration's position on global warming. Others saw a racial dimension to the tragedy.
"The fast and secure evacuation has been of white people," said the German leftist daily Die Tageszeitung. "Poor and black people stayed behind. It is as if time had stopped between the racial unrest of the '60s and today."
Some of the most heartfelt expressions of sympathy were from Southeast Asia, where memories of the tsunami -- another surge of angry waters that took tens of thousands of lives -- are still fresh.
"The people of Aceh and Nias learned from the tsunami last year, and we are also grateful for the American people's generosity to help us here," said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, Indonesia's director of tsunami reconstruction. "Perhaps we can find some lesson learned that we can share with the people of America."
