Mexico is the last stop on Bush´s first-ever presidential tour through Latin America, a tour he began this past Thursday, when he visited Brazil´s president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva in Sao Paulo. Bush will be stopping in on some of the Latin American countries that remain more-or-less friendly with the United States. After Brazil he visited Uruguay, Colombia and Guatemala, and will cap the whole thing off on Tuesday in Mexico.

Bush is not particularly popular south of the Rio Bravo (or north of it either, these days), and he has been confronted by hostile demonstrations at every stop on the tour. The issues are U.S.-promoted free-market development and the U.S. war in Iraq, both, in the eyes of the demonstrators, manifestations of the U.S. determination to maintain itself as the world´s sole imperial power.

Bush´s chief antagonist on this tour is Venezuela´s Hugo Chávez, who led an anti-Bush, anti-free-trade protest rally in a Buenos Aires soccer stadium on Friday as Bush was landing in Montevideo, just across the Río de la Plata from Argentina.

The Chávez rally notwithstanding, free trade is not Bush´s calling card on this particular trip. He began the trip in Sao Paulo with an offer to President Lula to form a U.S.-Brazil ethanol-producing partnership. The two countries, taken together, now produce 70 percent of the world´s sugar cane- and corn-based ethanol, an alternative to fossil fuels.

The offer was not about free trade, but about state-directed development based on ethanol production, a project, Bush told Lula, that could begin to alleviate Brazil´s awesome malnutrition and poverty. Bush was pitching a project, that is, in the name of combating poverty and promoting social justice, a pitch that sounds like it was made on Hugo Chávez´s terrain.

And he was so serious about the project that he had dispatched two undersecretaries of state a week early to prepare the ground for the presidential discussion. Citing the environmental benefits of ethanol, Lula signed on to the deal.

And Bush is so serious about the Chávez threat that he has been touting, with slight exaggeration, all the United States has done for the region under his presidency. "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,´ " he told CNN´s Spanish-language network on Thursday. "In fact, the record has been a strong record."

But the U.S. press, alert to Bush´s frequent misstatements, quickly pointed out that U.S. aid to Latin America has not grown at all over the course of Bush´s two terms in office, and that the budget he sent to Congress last month proposed cutting aid from $1.6 billion to $1.47 billion.

He did, however, announce new programs to train teachers in Latin America, the inauguration of a movable health-services program aboard a U.S. Navy medical ship stationed in the Caribbean, and U.S. support for several low-income housing programs.

What is most curious, however, and what has been emphasized by much of the Mexican and Latin American press, is that much of the inter-American agenda has now been defined by the politics of the populist left.

"Something curious has occurred on the road to [Bush´s] tour," wrote La Jornada´s Washington correspondent David Brooks last Wednesday. "Bush and his government — and not Hugo Chávez, Néstor Kirchner or Evo Morales — have had to change strategy and now find themselves obliged to compete for the hearts and minds of the hemisphere on the terrain established by their adversaries."

Bush´s tour is really about Washington´s diminished influence and lost credibility in the region. The president´s handlers feel a need to recover lost territory in the region and to isolate the government of Hugo Chávez. And even though Bush intends to reaffirm the neoliberal prescription for development and growth in the Americas, he is now armed with words like "justice" and "equality," and is willing to think about the presence of clauses protecting workers´ rights and the environment in future trade accords. Whatever reservations we may have about Chávez, this change is his doing.

Indeed, things have changed to such a degree that even Mexico´s pro-U.S. president, Felipe Calderón, feels comfortable advising his U.S. counterpart that Mexico seeks a relationship "of mutual respect" with Washington, and not one of "subordination."

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