REPORT CALLS FOR FRESH APPROACH TO LATIN AMERICA

WASHINGTON -- With the election of Barack Obama, the United States
has a fresh chance to reinvigorate its relations with Latin America,
according to a new report that recommends Washington overhaul its
drug policies at home and pursue a rapprochement with Cuba.

The report, compiled by prominent former policy-makers from the
United States and Latin America and scheduled for release on Monday
by the Brookings Institution, called on the new administration to put
Latin America at the center of its foreign policy radar screen.

Among the most striking recommendations is a near-total reversal in
policy toward Cuba. The report advocates lifting all restrictions on
travel by Americans, promoting more contacts with Cuban diplomats and
taking Cuba off the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

"This may make the over-40 generation of Cuban-Americans in Miami
jump-up-and-down mad, but there is a whole generation of
Cuban-Americans who want to change this relationship," said Thomas R.
Pickering, a longtime diplomat and former under secretary of state.

Mr. Pickering, who once served as American ambassador to El Salvador,
is co-chairman of a commission that produced the report, along with
the former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo.

Younger Cuban-Americans, Mr. Pickering said, are less interested in
isolating the Castro government than in bettering the conditions of
their families still living in Cuba. Lowering barriers between Cuba
and the United States, the report says, would enable other voices to
emerge there.

The report sets out several other specific and general measures,
including Congressional approval of free trade agreements with
Colombia and Panama and a re-evaluation of American counternarcotics
policy -- the war on drugs -- which it condemns as a failure.

"We've been reluctant to acknowledge this in the United States," Mr.
Pickering said. "We don't want to shine a spotlight on ourselves; we
want to shine it on places where the stuff is coming from."

Efforts to eradicate drug production in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia
have become less successful as drug traffickers have moved their
operations farther into the jungle, Mr. Pickering said. While these
efforts must go on, he said the United States needed to stem demand at home.

The number of heroin and cocaine addicts in the United States, the
report says, has not changed much since the mid-1980s, a fact that
the report attributes to a failure to reduce production and to an
ineffectiveness among American drug prevention and treatment programs.

Mr. Zedillo said in a telephone interview that drug trafficking,
fueled by such a huge and hungry market, had spread throughout Latin
America and should no longer be thought of as a Colombian, Mexican or
Bolivian problem.

The report was equally blunt about trade policy, saying that Congress
needed to pass the Colombia trade deal to maintain the credibility of
the United States. Then, it said, the United States should
de-emphasize bilateral deals in favor of reviving the moribund trade
negotiations known as the Doha Round.

The election of Mr. Obama sends mixed signals on the Colombia trade
issue. Some analysts said they believed Mr. Obama remained, at core,
a believer in globalization and free trade. But as a senator, he
resisted passage of the Colombia deal because of concerns about
violence toward union officials there.

"How a President Obama, working with a Democratic Congress,
reconciles those goals and principles is going to be tricky," said
Strobe Talbott, the Brookings Institution president.

Protectionist sentiment is likely to intensify because of the
economic crisis, Mr. Talbott said. The crisis has already hit Brazil
and Mexico hard, though Mr. Zedillo noted that they were better
equipped to bounce back than during previous upheavals because of
sounder economic policies.

If the Colombia deal dies, trade experts said, it will mainly
penalize American exporters, since Colombian exports to the United
States already enjoy favorable terms. But the experts said it could
undermine Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, one of the region's
most pro-American leaders.

Mr. Obama's election, experts said, could change the tenor of
relations with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, whose periodic
anti-American outbursts have poisoned ties with a once-reliable ally.

"Hugo Chavez is conscious of the fact that Barack Obama is on his
side of the fence, representing the downtrodden side of American
society," Mr. Pickering said. "Does he really want to take on Obama?"

The report does not criticize the Bush administration, though it says
that relations with Latin America have languished in recent years
because the White House has been preoccupied with other matters.

As it happens, President Bush made his last scheduled foreign trip
over the weekend to Peru, for a meeting of leaders from Asia-Pacific
countries. But in a sign of the White House's agenda, his crucial
one-on-one meeting before the conference was with China's president, Hu Jintao.

China has established a foothold in several countries in Latin
America as a trading partner and investor, according to the report,
which predicted Beijing would vie with Washington for influence.

Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the assistant secretary of state responsible
for Latin America, said the report was constructive, though its call
for closer ties with Cuba did not confront the fact that this would
depend on the Cuban government's moving toward democracy, something
it has not done.

Mr. Shannon also disputed the contention that the United States had
neglected Latin America, pointing out that Mr. Bush's trip to Peru
was his ninth to the region as president.