Guess who's the most unpopular US president ever in South America?

Two South American stories:

1. An article that appeared before Bush went to South America:
Bush Faces Tough Time in South America -- by Larry Rohter

If George W. Bush is expecting some respite from his troubles at home during a four-day visit to Argentina and Brazil that begins Thursday, he is in for a very rude awakening.

Polls show Mr. Bush to be the most unpopular American president ever among Latin Americans, and thousands of demonstrators, led by the soccer idol Diego Maradona, are flocking to the Argentine beach resort of Mar del Plata to protest his presence at a summit meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders. The greeting from his fellow heads of state, who have been complaining of his administration's neglect of and indifference to the region for five years, does not promise to be especially warm, either.

"He doesn't have any money to offer, so the president doesn't really have any cards to play," said Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "Nobody among the crop of fiscally conservative but socially progressive presidents that we now have around the region is going to go to his defense."

The theme of what is formally known as the Fourth Summit of the Americas is "Creating Jobs to Fight Poverty and Strengthen Democratic Governance." But the feeling among many Latin Americans is that the United States is coming with little to offer other than the usual nostrums about free trade, open markets, privatization and fiscal austerity, the same recipe that has vastly increased social inequality throughout Latin America during the past decade.

"We've almost all of us been down that road, and it didn't work," said a diplomat from one South American country, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to offend the Bush administration. "The United States continues to see things one way, but most of the rest of the hemisphere has moved on and is heading in another direction."

Even in the area of free trade, which Washington continues to offer as the solution to the region's problems, progress has slowed to a crawl. Washington recently struck such an agreement with Central American nations, but the 2005 deadline for a much broader hemispheric accord, set at the first summit meeting in Miami in 1994, has now come and gone. Moreover, while Latin America had one of its better economic performances last year, much of that growth came from booming sales of raw materials to China, not trade with the United States.

"The pace of free trade negotiations has slowed down," but not "the commitment to some kind of broader hemispheric agreement," Thomas A. Shannon, the American assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Washington. "We don't see any dramatic stepping away" from the notion that "democracy and free markets really do deliver the goods," he added.

Latin American diplomats, however, say negotiations over a joint text to be issued at the end of the three-day meeting have been fraught with disagreement. The Bush administration and Canada have been pushing for a resounding endorsement of what is known as the Washington Consensus, which embodies the free-trade message. But Latin America, with Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez, particularly scathing in his condemnations and threatening to steal the show, has been resisting.

"We have not yet attained a common language," Argentina's deputy foreign minister, Jorge Taiana, said last week. "Different countries have different experiences, and therefore different visions of things."

No country on the continent has suffered more economically in recent years than Argentina, and a poll taken there last month showed that a majority wished Mr. Bush would simply stay home. After an economic and political crisis in 2001 and 2002 that led to the collapse of its currency and the biggest debt default in history, Argentina is now the fastest growing country in South America, despite ignoring the guidance of the Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund.

Last month, at a conference of Ibero-American heads of state in Spain, Mr. Bush's Latin American counterparts strongly signaled their feisty mood. In unusually blunt language, their final communiqué sharply criticized Washington's position both on Cuba, which was not invited to the summit meeting, and on terrorism.

Rather than just condemn the American economic embargo of Cuba, the statement referred to a "blockade," the term that Fidel Castro favors because it implies a violation of international law. The declaration also called on the United States to extradite a Cuban exile wanted in Venezuela and Cuba for blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976, saying that every nation must have a "commitment to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations."

Mr. Shannon described the declarations as "unfortunate." He said, "Why other countries were prepared to accept that language, well, I guess you'll have to ask them." He added, "We've made clear to our partners that this kind of language is certainly not helpful" because it "misrepresents our policy."

There is also the matter of recent elections at the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, in which Washington was seen as trying to muscle its candidate into office. The Bush administration failed in the first instance and succeeded in the second, but both cases appear to have left a residue of resentment.

"There is just a lot of skepticism and mistrust, because the United States continues to regard Latin America as a region we can take for granted, that has to go along with us on whatever we do," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at Inter-American Dialogue, a research group based in Washington. "But Latin America has changed and is behaving very differently on the world stage."

Security for the Mar del Plata summit meeting will be at record levels, with more than 7,000 security agents expected. More than 100 people were killed in two anti-Semitic terrorist attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990's, which Argentine authorities attribute to Iran, and President Néstor Kirchner dreads the thought of any recurrence.

A "countersummit" by groups opposed to free trade, globalization and Mr. Bush is scheduled to begin Wednesday. Mr. Maradona, calling Mr. Bush's presence an affront to Argentine dignity, has promised to lead demonstrations, and even Mr. Chávez, the current hero of the Latin American left, said he would attend.

"Bush is a torturer, a violator of human rights and a murderer, who does not respect United Nations resolutions, international treaties or the sovereignty of peoples, as in the case of Iraq," said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is one of the protest organizers. "He is not welcome in Argentina, and he should be repudiated."

2. The Threat of Hope in Latin America -- by Naomi Klein

When Manuel Rozental got home one night last month, friends told him two strange men had been asking questions about him. In this close-knit indigenous community in southwestern Colombia ringed by soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, strangers asking questions about you is never a good thing.

The Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, which leads a political movement that is autonomous from all those armed forces, held an emergency meeting. They decided that Rozental, their communications coordinator, who had been instrumental in campaigns for agrarian reform and against a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, had to get out of the country—fast.

They were certain that those strangers had been sent to kill Rozental—the only question was, by whom? The US-backed national government, which notoriously uses right-wing paramilitaries to do its dirty work? Or was it the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Latin America’s oldest Marxist guerrilla army, which does its dirty work all on its own? Oddly, both were distinct possibilities. Despite being on opposing sides of a forty-one-year civil war, the Uribe government and the FARC wholeheartedly agree that life would be infinitely simpler without Cauca’s increasingly powerful indigenous movement.

Prominent indigenous leaders in northern Cauca have been kidnapped or assassinated by the FARC, which seeks to be the exclusive voice of Colombia’s poor. And indigenous authorities had been informed that the FARC wanted Rozental dead. For months rumors had been circulated that he was the worst thing you can be in the books of a left-wing guerrilla movement: a CIA agent. But that doesn’t mean the strangers were FARC assassins, because there had been other rumors too, spread through the media by government officials. They held that Rozental was the worst thing you can be in the books of a right-wing, Bush-bankrolled politician: “an international terrorist.”

On October 27 the Indigenous Council, representing the roughly 110,000 Nasa Indians in the region, issued an angry communiqué: “Manuel is no terrorist. He is no paramilitary. He is no agent of the CIA. He is a part of our community who must not be silenced by bullets.” The Nasa leaders say they know why Rozental, now living in exile in Canada, has come under threat. It is the same reason that this past April two peaceful indigenous villages in Northern Cauca were turned into war zones after the FARC attacked police posts in the town centers, giving the government an excuse for a full-scale occupation.

All of this is happening because the indigenous movement is on a roll. In the past year the Nasa of northern Cauca have held the largest antigovernment protests in recent Colombian history and organized local referendums against free trade that had a turnout of 70 percent, higher than any official election (with a near unanimous “no” result). And in September thousands took over two large haciendas, forcing the government to make good on a long-promised land settlement. All these actions unfolded under the protection of the Nasa’s unique Indigenous Guard, who patrol their territory armed only with sticks.

In a country ruled by M-16s, AK-47s, pipe bombs and Black Hawk helicopters, this combination of militancy and nonviolence is unheard of. And that is the quiet miracle the Nasa have accomplished: They revived the hope killed when paramilitaries systematically slaughtered left-wing politicians, including dozens of elected officials and two Unión Patriótica presidential candidates. At the end of the bloody campaign in the early nineties, the FARC understandably concluded that engaging in open politics was a suicide mission. The key to the Nasa’s success, Rozental says, is that they are not trying to take over state institutions, which “have lost all legitimacy.” They are instead “building a new legitimacy based on an indigenous and popular mandate that has grown out of participatory congresses, assemblies and elections. Our process and our alternative institutions have put the official democracy to shame. That’s why the government is so angry.”

The Nasa have shattered the illusion, cherished by both sides, that Colombia’s conflict can be reduced to a binary war. Their free-trade referendums have been imitated by nonindigenous unions, students, farmers and local politicians nationwide; their land takeovers have inspired other indigenous and peasant groups to do the same. A year ago 60,000 marched demanding peace and autonomy; last month those same demands were echoed by simultaneous marches in thirty-two of Colombia’s provinces. Each action, explains Hector Mondragon, well-known Colombian economist and activist, “has had a multiplier effect.”

Across Latin America a similarly explosive multiplier effect is under way, with indigenous movements redrawing the continent’s political map, demanding not just “rights” but a reinvention of the state along deeply democratic lines. In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups have shown they have the power to topple governments. In Argentina, when mass protests ousted five presidents in 2001 and ’02, the words of Mexico’s Zapatistas were shouted on the streets of Buenos Aires. At this writing, George W. Bush is on his way to Argentina, where he will discover that the spirit of that revolt is alive and well.

As in northern Cauca, governments attempt to brand these indigenous-inspired movements as terrorist. And not surprisingly Washington is offering military and ideological assistance: There has been a marked increase in US troop activity near the Bolivian border in Paraguay, and a recent study by the National Intelligence Council warned that indigenous movements, although peaceful now, could “consider more drastic means” in the future.

Indigenous movements are indeed a threat to the exhausted free-trade policies Bush is currently hawking, with ever fewer buyers, across Latin America. Their power comes not from terror but from a new terror-resistant strain of hope, one so sturdy it can take root in the midst of Colombia’s seemingly hopeless civil war. And if it can grow there, it can take root anywhere.

(Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, and, most recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate.)