Enrique
Krauze

Focused on its enemies, the Bush administration has forgotten its friends. Only one world region went entirely unmentioned in the State of the Union speech: Latin America. In another, far distant age -- five days before terror struck New York and Washington -- President Bush pledged a new alliance with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, on the grounds that a strong Mexico makes for a stronger United States. After 9/11, however, everything changed.

All of Latin America now seems aware that the United States has returned to an essentially reactive diplomacy that seems to come to life only when there are missiles pointing at its shores, Marxist guerrillas in the jungles, or revolutionary governments in the old banana republics. This is unfortunate because Latin America (with the exception of Cuba) has for a decade been abandoning its old grievances, drawing closer to the United States, opting for democracy and rejecting militarism, statism and Marxism. What is needed to make Washington take this Copernican shift seriously and support it in tangible ways?

Maybe what is needed is for the miracle to end. And it may indeed end, if, in the face of American neglect, Latin Americans turn toward the biggest specter of the past: populism, the age-old temptation to put power in the hands of a heaven-sent strongman -- yesterday in Alberto Fujimori's Peru, today in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, and tomorrow perhaps in a charismatic Mexican politician.

Unfortunately, populist sentiment has been reinforced by Washington's mistakes. It lost democratic credibility by not condemning the coup against the populist but democratically elected Mr. Chávez. There was the scolding of Brazil and Argentina by Paul H. O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, which sent their currencies tumbling. And there is the supreme shortsightedness of the economic blockade of Cuba.

More worrisome still is the administration's attitude toward its neighbor. The shelving of the 2001 immigration agreement was a mistake that has been compounded by new subsidies for American farmers, which fly in the face of the reforms required of Mexican agriculture under Nafta. Mexico's rural regions are its most sensitive. It was peasants who fought the Mexican Revolution 90 years ago, and it is from rural Mexico that the next explosion would likely come.

I agree with Mr. Bush that if Saddam Hussein is not evil ''then evil has no meaning.'' But to combat evil, one must find strength in friendship. In dealing with the south, George W. Bush should try a different doctrine: pre-emptive cooperation.

Publicado en The New York Times, 30 de enero de 2003.