DUMPING OF BOLIVIA'S PRESIDENT NOT UNUSUAL

WASHINGTON - It's becoming a habit for Latin American countries: Elect a
president, then drive him from office.

The latest example is Bolivia, where President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was
sent packing last Friday just 15 months after he was elected, a victim
largely of an uprising led by the country's newly empowered indigenous
population.

Sanchez de Lozada joins presidents from Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay who
were forced from office in recent years. But the unrest extends well beyond
these few countries.

"We have watched circumstances in nearly every country deteriorate," said a
recent report by the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based center for
policy analysis.

Since 2000, it said, "growth has come to a standstill, foreign investment
has dropped sharply and unemployment and poverty have worsened."

To the extent that the Bolivian uprising had a leader, it was Evo Morales,
an Aymara Indian who heads a coca workers union. He rejects capitalism, and
the itinerary on his recent foreign travels - Libya and Venezuela - shows
where his political sympathies lie. He led a faction opposed to a
U.S.-backed plan to eradicate coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Morales may be Bolivia's most popular politician.

Michael Shifter, a vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, says part
of the blame rests with the Bush administration which has "failed to show
appropriate interest in issues of concern to many Latin American nations,
like poverty and social tensions."

Mexico's foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, said recently the United
States is placing too much emphasis on combating terrorism at the expense of
Latin America's priorities.

Given a chance to tweak the United States, Latin American and Caribbean
nations take advantage. Last June, they rejected the U.S. candidate to serve
on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

For the first time in 44 years, the United States is not represented on the
commission, an arm of the Organization of American States.

For Secretary of State Colin Powell, it is a source of pride that all
hemispheric countries except Cuba are democracies. But he acknowledges the
results have been dispiriting.

"If we collectively do not deliver, then democracy has no meaning, free
market system has no meaning, and it is possible for us to go backward," he
said in a speech last April.

Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, Powell's top aide for Latin
America, told a House committee Tuesday that five years ago, it was possible
to speak of "improving governance and consolidating free markets; today we
must confront questions of governability and resist economic reversals."

Some argue that Latin America is not progressing because much of the region
has given only lip service to creating free-market economies.

The Index of Economic Freedom, which is published annually by the Heritage
Foundation, a conservative think tank, and The Wall Street Journal, lists 12
out of 23 Latin American countries as having "mostly unfree" economies.

And U.S. officials wonder what the alternatives there are to the market
economy. They note that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is no friend of
free markets; the country's economy is expected to shrink by more than 10
percent this year.

Corruption is another widely acknowledged problem. In the "corruption
perception index" of Transparency International, a global non- governmental
organization devoted to curbing corruption, only a handful of Latin American
and Caribbean countries were ranked among the 50 less corrupt of the 133
nations surveyed.

In large measure, the administration is pinning its hopes for a brighter day
for the hemisphere on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

A deadline of January 2005 has been set for completion of negotiations, and
there is no certainty that it can be met or that it will be as comprehensive
as the administration wants. Brazil is lobbying hard for a scaled-back
agreement.