Amid Snubs, Latin America Slips

President Bush, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and dozens of lesser officials were focused for weeks on the siege of Yasser Arafat’s office and the Bethlehem stand-off. Only a few dozen people were involved in these affairs, and the outcome was yet again bound to be inconclusive. Yet the television cameras were there, and that was enough to ensure the full attention of the U.S. government.

In the meantime, with no TV anchors present, the largest part of the Western Hemisphere, from Mexico to Patagonia, continued to slide into crises that threaten the most important U.S. interests and values, from the supply of oil--much more than we buy from the entire Middle East--to economic liberalization and even democratic governance.

Argentina’s economy, paralyzed by financial collapse, is now literally disintegrating as businesses simply shut down and the rural population retreats into subsistence. That inflicts heavy damage on nearby Uruguay, with adverse effects on impoverished Paraguay and Bolivia and even prosperous Chile. Brazil, with its trillion-dollar economy and 170 million inhabitants, will not be wrecked by Argentina’s troubles, but those troubles are weakening both its export-driven economy and popular support for the free-market policies that Argentina exemplified from the early 1990s. Not by coincidence, the presidential candidate who is now leading in the polls is Luiz Ignacio da Silva, a long-standing opponent of privatization and deregulation.

Only in Colombia is there a full-fledged internal war underway. But even Venezuela’s much less violent political convulsions--under the corrupt populism of Hugo Chavez--certainly block its economic recovery and threaten U.S. oil supplies.

The impact of the global economic slowdown, with its low commodity prices, is most severe in the poorest countries--Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Yet even Mexico, for all its economic and political progress of recent years, is suffering the consequences. The sharp fall in exports to the United States has stymied growth and shrunk government revenue--undermining the best intentions of its government to relieve poverty.

That in turn explains the surge in illegal immigration, which collides with the new United States preoccupation with border security, although Latin Americans are almost universally our friends in every way rather than U.S.-hating terrorists.

The United States government has reacted with spectacular inattention to these vast events, whose consequences are already serious and could easily become much worse.

With scarcely a minute of the president’s time since Sept. 11, and not much more from his Cabinet officials--even the Treasury secretary has found reasons to virtually ignore Argentina’s collapse--policy has inevitably drifted.

The obvious objection to more U.S. activism is that Latin America’s problems are structural and cultural; critics argue that more United States action would be useless.

As for economic aid, any large increase is fiscally impossible and could only be appropriate in any case to help the poorest Andean countries.

But that overlooks the political and psychological dimension of U.S.-Latin America relations: Even visits by mere undersecretaries, let alone Cabinet officials, raise the morale of local reformers, force decisions on outstanding issues and provide opportunities to solve problems in open markets.

It is on that score that the charge of gross inattention can be proven: On Thursday, the 1991 Andean Trade Preferences Act, designed to promote legal alternatives to cocaine production, expired in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru because of Senate objections engineered by the textile lobby.

The White House could easily overcome that now weak lobby with a small fraction of the president’s time and political leverage. Even that has been denied, however, as if to prove to our neighbors that we are indifferent to their plight.