MINDING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Ohio's Mike DeWine Has Developed A Keen Interest In Central, South America

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Mike DeWine was planning yet another trip south of the
border in 1997 when an aide urged him to meet with Vicente Fox Quesada,
then governor of a rural state in central Mexico.

"I've never heard of him," the Ohio Republican said.

The aide, a specialist on South American politics, confidently replied:
"Well, you will. He's going to be the next president of Mexico."

At an open-air restaurant in the mountains of Mexico, Fox treated DeWine,
the senator's wife, Fran, and staff members to lunch. For two hours, the
former delivery-truck driver spoke in flawless English of international
trade, the rule of law and the spread of drugs.

Three years later, in a stunning triumph, Fox ended the Institutional
Revolutionary Party's seven-decade monopoly on the presidency.

The casual luncheon represents one of many examples of the senator's
growing interest in the politics and economics of Mexico and the
often-forgotten nations of Central and South America.

While other lawmakers devote much of their energy to Europe, Asia or the
Middle East, DeWine has racked up thousand of air miles flying closer to home.

Since his election to the Senate in 1994, he has visited numerous countries
in South and Central America. He has made 12 trips to study AIDS treatment
in Haiti, including an August 2000 visit as part of a delegation led by
President Clinton.

DeWine has traveled four times to Colombia, the oldest democracy in South
America; three times to Mexico, one of America's largest trading partners;
twice to Panama with its crucial canal linking the Pacific Ocean to the
Atlantic; and once each to Chile and Peru.

He is tentatively scheduled to visit oil-rich Venezuela, a nation torn
asunder by strife between leftist President Hugo Chavez and his rivals, a
coalition of business and labor leaders.

Last month, DeWine and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., spent nearly two hours
chatting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in the presidential
summerhouse on an island near Cartagena. When they discussed Colombia's
brutal guerrilla war, Uribe vowed that he would aggressively build up his
army to defeat the 15,000 insurgents.

DeWine's interest in South America could not have been predicted 20 years
ago. He did not study the region in college, and he does not speak Spanish
or Portuguese, the languages of Colombia and Brazil.

"He speaks English," said senior aide Laurel Dawson with a laugh. "He's
from Cedarville."

But DeWine is fond of saying that Americans "ignore our own hemisphere at
our peril."

"One of the things I have tried to do in the Congress is keep reminding
people that this hemisphere is really important," he said. "If you look at
the source of drugs coming into this country, it's this hemisphere. If you
look at our major trading partners, it's this hemisphere. If you look at
the illegal immigration issue, it's coming from this hemisphere.

"When I went to the Senate, I decided that my main focus on foreign affairs
was going to be in this hemisphere. Frankly, we as a country had not paid
enough attention to it. And our future would be more and more tied to this
hemisphere -- and as every year went by, the importance of it would grow."

The United States exported $9 billion worth of goods in 2001 to the five
Central American countries -- more than U.S. exports to Russia and India
combined. Mexico's exports to the United States have more than doubled --
to $101 billion -- from 1994 to 2001, while Venezuela supplies 15 percent
of America's oil.

Yet even though Fidel Castro in Cuba remains the last unelected leader of
Latin America, analysts warn that the region's future remains shaky.

"Governments are elected, but the levels of corruption are extremely high,"
said Michael Shifter, vice president for the Washington think tank
Inter-American Dialogue. "Political institutions, like parties and justice
systems don't work very well."

Most lawmakers tend to avoid Latin America, Shifter said, because "it's a
headache for a lot of members. I think it's considered a region where there
are only problems. People like DeWine are the exception."

As a House member from 1983 through 1990, DeWine was drawn to Central
America, although largely through the prism of his staunch anti-Communist
views. He and other conservatives labeled the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua as Marxist and favored help for the contra rebels. Many Democrats
adamantly opposed aid to the contras, whom they saw as anti-democratic.

But with his election to the Senate, DeWine realized that the issues in
South America had changed, and he began to broaden his interests.

The Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega had been voted out in 1990, and
right-wing authoritarian regimes in Brazil, Argentina and Chile swept away.
They were replaced by fledgling democracies struggling to spark their
economies and reduce the intense financial disparity between the wealthy
and the poor.

DeWine has seized on those issues.

He wants more money to treat AIDS patients in Haiti and Guyana. And last
week, he introduced a bill to allow Haiti to export clothing duty-free to
the United States if Haiti assembles the apparel from fabric produced in
countries where the United States has a free-trade agreement.

He supports President Bush's request to increase financial assistance to
Colombia to nearly $700 million, making that nation the third-largest
recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. He touts the
advantages of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and
Canada and urges the Bush administration to swiftly conclude a Free Trade
Area of the Americas, which would reduce or eliminate tariffs in the 34
nations of North and South America.

Unlike the DeWine of the 1980s, who harshly assailed opponents of contra
aid, DeWine today seems less partisan in foreign affairs. He frequently
travels to Latin America with Democrats, joining Sens. Richard Durbin of
Illinois and Ben Nelson of Nebraska on a Haiti trip earlier this year.

DeWine argues that Latin America too often has divided the political
parties -- Republicans wanted to help the contras and Democrats backed
Clinton in his 1994 effort to restore exiled President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to power in Haiti.

"I felt strongly we needed a bipartisan approach for this hemisphere,"
DeWine said. "I am a very strong believer in a bipartisan approach to
foreign policy."

U.S. relations with Latin America have often zigzagged -- from President
Calvin Coolidge's order to send troops into Nicaragua in the 1920s to
pledges by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt not to
interfere in the internal affairs of South America.

DeWine himself has provoked sharp criticism from some Americans for his
support of Colombia's war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Last year, 10 protesters were arrested during a sit-in outside DeWine's
Columbus office. The U.S. aerial spraying of coca crops, they contended,
was destroying produce and harming children.

The senator met with some of the protesters in August in his Dayton office.

"We were very glad to have the meeting, but I don't want to paint too rosy
a picture," said Carol Richardson, national grass-roots coordinator for
Witness for Peace.

Richardson, who is from Columbus, said the organization wanted to show
DeWine that there are alternatives to the spraying. "If the Big Darby Creek
were being sprayed," she added, "he'd be up in arms."

During his last trip to Colombia, DeWine along with Chafee were under heavy
guard because FARC has launched attacks closer to the larger cities. The
group is holding three Americans who were seized last month when their
plane crashed 200 miles south of Bogota. FARC maintains that the Americans
are CIA agents.

"This is a country that lives under siege," DeWine said. "I was very
impressed with the president. He was a very resolute, very tough, very
determined individual.

"We have no choice but to continue to work with the Colombian government.
This is an old democracy that is fighting terrorism, and if we don't
support a democracy that is fighting terrorism in our own hemisphere, then
I don't know where we will."