Partnership on Environment Caps Clinton Visit

President Clinton on Saturday hailed a new partnership with Argentina on global warming and the environment, capping a weeklong bid to win the trust of South Americans who long have viewed the United States as a go-it-alone bully.

Against a backdrop of the snowcapped Andes jutting into a crystal-blue sky, Clinton cited the “broad and deep partnership” reached with Argentine President Carlos Menem on climate change issues. Menem is the first leader of the developing world to endorse, albeit in broad terms, the U.S. approach, which would include mandatory limits on emissions that are believed to harm the Earth’s atmosphere.

“For the children in this audience, our partnership to protect the environment of our nations and the entire globe is perhaps the most important part of what we must do together,” Clinton said. The goal, he said, is “realistic and binding limits” on emissions.

International negotiations on the enormously complex issue will resume Monday in Bonn as a step toward reaching a sweeping global accord two months from now in Kyoto, Japan. Under the timetable, the White House faces acute pressure to resolve by midweek its own internal battle over details of the U.S. position on climate change.

Saturday’s announcement afforded the Clinton administration a chance to make news on a trip that analysts believe may have been most significant on another level--as a turning point in what historically has been a distant relationship between North and South America.

During the U.S. delegation’s scramble through South America last week, the visitors from Washington connected with their hosts in ways that many here did not expect.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was brought to tears during a visit with Jewish leaders who remain frustrated about unsolved terrorist bombings in Buenos Aires. “I am going to help you,” Albright reportedly said during the closed-door meeting.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton won ovations for advocating family planning in Argentina, even as she raised eyebrows among officials who share the Vatican-led opposition to birth control.

And on a well-received visit to a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Clinton scored a left-footed goal in a pickup soccer game with local kids and Pele, the retired soccer legend who now is a government official.

Certainly, reactions to Clinton were often more polite or even apathetic than euphoric, and there were isolated outbursts of anti-U.S. sentiment, along with bruised feelings in Brazil over perceived slights by the president’s advance party. Moreover, the president could not escape embarrassing reports about Democratic fund-raising even here; on one occasion, the moderator of a town hall meeting in Buenos Aires seemed to startle Clinton when she brought up the controversy.

In addition, Clinton was traveling in a region where commentators have complained that he must see their continent as a low priority because he never found time to go there during his first term in office.

Nonetheless, local reviewers were generally favorable toward Clinton’s approach at building a new partnership.

Clinton “knew what he was talking about,” said Mary Beloff, a Buenos Aires university law professor who spoke with the Clintons after the town hall event. “He knew the hot issues of the region, and he had good answers. . . . And Hillary as well.”

And if the trip offered little in the way of dramatic treaties, anecdotally, at least, Clinton was pleased with his effort to highlight hemisphere-wide concerns about trade, education, the environment and social justice.

In an interview with Argentine reporters, Clinton went so far as to declare that “what I’m trying to do is to promote a process of reorganization of the world” in which growing trade ties, education and global cooperation on various fronts lead to broad gains in the standard of living.

The cooperative efforts underline the vast forces that are bringing the Americas closer together: As former military dictatorships throughout the continent have embraced free-market reforms and the rule of law, the United States and South America perceive vast new common ground, according to optimistic White House officials.

“What we’re seeing here is literally a sea change in the relations between the United States and Latin America,” Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, the U.S. national security advisor, declared last week. “It didn’t just happen on this trip--it’s been happening--but this trip I think reflects it, accelerates it, encapsulates it.”

Clearly, the issue of climate change has created new divisions, including ones between advanced, industrial nations with most of the factories, and the developing ones that are loath to place limits on their young industries.

In Saturday’s U.S.-Argentine agreement on the environment, the two nations agreed that developing countries should participate “meaningfully” in a solution that will limit their own polluting.

Under the broad, if vague, principles agreed on, companies in industrialized nations could get emissions-reduction “credit” by helping to reduce pollution in less developed countries rather than their own--say, by planting trees or investing in clean-air technologies overseas.

“I want to make it clear that the strategy we embrace today does not ask developing nations to sacrifice the legitimate aspirations of their people for economic growth,” Clinton said Saturday, calling the approach a new course that ensures that “today’s progress does not come at tomorrow’s expense.”

Advocates of such an approach say it is cost-effective without exacting a crushing burden on the world’s more fragile, developing economies. But critics caution that it amounts to a high-stakes experiment with the environment and that key questions remain about enforcement, monitoring and other matters.

Clinton failed to exact such agreements during his visits to Venezuela and Brazil last week. But James Steinberg, deputy national security advisor, told reporters that Saturday’s agreement could prove influential to other nations.

“It’s very important that Argentina, as a leading developing country, is now accepting this as an important part of the overall strategy,” he said.

Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.