Garcia sets agenda for Bush meeting

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It is much transformed Alan Garcia who meets President Bush today at the White House. The Peruvian president saw the world differently during his first stint as president of Peru in the 1980s.

In those days, as a 30-something enfant terrible, Garcia, a spellbinding orator, balked at making debt payments to foreign lenders and assailed U.S. policy in Central America. He left his country a shambles, in the throes of a guerrilla war and economic turmoil.

A disgraced Garcia went into exile for years. Many Peruvians thought they had seen the last of el Caballo Loco [Crazy Horse], as Garcia was known. Not so.

Garcia sealed his extraordinary comeback bid last as a moderate alternative to Ollanta Humala, an ex-Army colonel and acolyte of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Given the alternative, the White House was thrilled to welcome Alan Garcia, the sequel.

In coming to Washington, Garcia says he plans an intense lobbying campaign for U.S. approval of a free-trade deal with Peru. Drug-trafficking will also be on the agenda. In recent weeks, Garcia has pledged to use war planes to bomb cocaine laboratories and clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian jungle. His hard-line stance has triggered criticism at home that he is playing to his new ``friends’’ in Washington.

How times, and el Caballo Loco, have changed.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires and Adriana León in Lima.