Latin American nations edge away from U.S.

[Judi Lynn]

Latin American nations edge away from U.S.
Frank Bajak, Associated Press

Sunday, October 19, 2008


(10-19) 04:00 PDT Quito, Ecuador -- In a matter of weeks, a Russian naval squadron will arrive in the waters off Latin America for the first time since the Cold War. It is already getting a warm welcome from some in a region where the influence of the United States is in decline.

("The U.S. Fourth Fleet can come to Latin America but a Russian fleet can't?" said Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa. "If you ask me, any country and any fleet that wants can visit us. We're a country of open doors."

The United States remains the strongest outside power in Latin America by most measures, including trade, military cooperation and the sheer size of its embassies. Yet U.S. clout in what it once considered its backyard has sunk to perhaps the lowest point in decades. As Washington turned its attention to the Middle East, Latin America swung to the left and other powers moved in.

The United States' financial crisis is not helping. Latin American countries forced by Washington to swallow painful austerity measures in the 1980s and 1990s are aghast at the U.S. failure to police its own markets.

"We did our homework - and they didn't, they who've been telling us for three decades what to do," the man who presides over Latin America's largest economy, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, complained bitterly.

More:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/19/MNPD13F1UM.DTL

Contrary to what Associated Press's fabulous "journalist," Frank Bajak would have you believe, the wildly beloved President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva doesn't "complain bitterly." No one has EVER attempted to pin that crap on him. Never.