Bush heads to Latin America

US President George Bush sets off today on a week-long tour of Latin America, aiming to challenge a widespread perception in the region of US neglect.

The perception has helped fuel leftist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez’s rising influence in the US’ backyard.

Mr Bush, who will visit five countries, will argue that strong democratic governments hold the promise of prosperity. He hopes his journey will resonate with the one in four Latin Americans who live on less than €1.50 a day and wonder if democracy will ever deliver them a better life.

“The trip is to remind people that we care,” Mr Bush said in an interview with CNN En Espanol.

“I do worry about the fact that some say: ’Well, the United States hasn’t paid enough attention to us,’ or ’The United States really isn’t anything more than worried about terrorism,’ and when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.”

Mr Bush, with less than two years left in his presidency, has a weak hand. Anti-Americanism and Mr Bush’s poor image, tainted by the war in Iraq, have only fuelled Mr Chavez’s influence in the region and beyond.

The fiery leader of oil-rich Venezuela, who has labelled Bush “the devil” and dismisses him as the “little gentleman from the north”, plans to play to this discontent. He has called for protests during Mr Bush’s stay and is leading a rally in Argentina when the president visits neighbouring Uruguay.

“Regardless of what Hugo Chavez says about us, we’re not the bogeyman,” said Russell Crandall, a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council who is now at the Centre for American Progress.

Mr Bush has packed a suitcase of strategies for nurturing trade, fighting drug-traffickers and curbing poverty and social inequality for his trip, which also will take him to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, where protests preceded his visit.

Protesters, most of them women from the Via Campesina farmworkers movement, briefly shut down an iron ore mine, invaded an ethanol distillery and took over the Rio de Janeiro offices of Brazil’s National Development Bank.

Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy roads near the locations in Sao Paulo where Mr Bush will appear as he kicks off his tour.

Mr Bush leaves behind fights in Washington over money for an unpopular war, new criticism about inadequate care of wounded US troops returning home from Iraq and this week’s conviction of former White House aide Lewis ’Scooter’ Libby for lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.

When he first became president, Mr Bush promised that the United States’ relationship with the region, Mexico in particular, was a top priority.

His first state dinner was for former Mexican president Vicente Fox. The attacks on September 11, 2001, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, turned Mr Bush’s focus to the Middle East.