Friday, January 17, 2003

Cuaderno Latinoamericano - Clay who? Like the energizer bunny, Bush's Latin American policy keeps going, and going, and going ... down the drain. As Andres Oppenheimer notes in the column linked to above, Bush sends people like Clay Johnson III, his deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, to attend the inauguration of a Latin American head of state as head of the US delegation. Even Oppenheimer had no clue who Johnson was, and had to make a few phone calls to find out. Bush should not be surprised when Latin America comes up to bite his global foreign policy initiatives in the a**. As past US Presidents have discovered after behaving so cavalierly towards the region, Latin America will get the US's attention in other, more troubling ways, if it can't get the US's attention in the course of normal, stable, day-to-day affairs that carry some importance within the region.

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