Bush on 5-nation tour of Latin America

WASHINGTON – President Bush was ready to challenge a widespread perception in Latin America that U.S. neglect has empowered leftist leader Hugo Chavez as he left Thursday on a five-nation tour of the region.\nBush argues that strong democratic governments hold the promise of prosperity. He hopes his trip will resonate with the one in four impoverished Latin Americans, who live on less than $2 a day and wonder whether democracy will ever deliver them a better life.\n“The trip is to remind people that we care,” Bush said in an interview Wednesday with CNN En Espanol. “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.’ And when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.”\nBut Bush, with just two years left in his presidency, has a weak hand. Anti-Americanism and Bush’s poor image, tainted by the war in Iraq, have only fueled Chavez’s influence in the region and beyond.\nThe fiery leader of oil-rich Venezuela, who has labeled Bush “the devil” and dismisses him as the “little gentleman from the North,” plans to play to this discontent. He has called for protests during Bush’s stay and is leading a rally in Argentina when the president visits neighboring Uruguay.\nThe president’s message: “Regardless of what Hugo Chavez says about us, we’re not the bogeyman,” said Russell Crandall, a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council who is now at the Center for American Progress.\nBush has packed a suitcase of strategies for nurturing trade, fighting drug-traffickers and curbing poverty and social inequality for his trip, which also will take him to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, where protests on Wednesday preceded his visit.\nProtesters, most of them women from the Via Campesina farmworkers movement, briefly shut down an iron ore mine, invaded an ethanol distillery and took over the Rio de Janeiro offices of Brazil’s National Development Bank. Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy highways near the locations in Sao Paulo where Bush will appear as he kicks off his Latin American tour.\nProtest organizers denounced foreign investment in the vast sugarcane fields that are used to produce Brazil’s ethanol.