U.S. YAWNS AS LATIN AMERICA CRUMBLES

PRESIDENT Bush, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and dozens of
lesser officials were focused for weeks on the siege of Yasser Arafat's
office and the Bethlehem stand-off. Only a few dozen people were involved
in these affairs, and the outcome was yet again bound to be inconclusive.
Yet the television cameras were there, and that was enough to ensure the
full attention of the U.S. government.

In the meantime, with no TV anchors present, the largest part of the
Western Hemisphere, from Mexico to Patagonia, continued to slide into
crises that threaten the most important U.S. interests and values, from the
supply of oil -- much more than we buy from the entire Middle East -- to
economic liberalization and even democratic governance.

Argentina's economy, paralyzed by financial collapse, is literally
disintegrating as businesses simply shut down and the rural population
retreats into subsistence. That inflicts heavy damage on nearby Uruguay,
with adverse effects on impoverished Paraguay and Bolivia and even
prosperous Chile. Brazil, with its trillion-dollar economy and 170 million
inhabitants, will not be wrecked by Argentina's troubles, but those
troubles are weakening both its export-driven economy and popular support
for the free-market policies that Argentina exemplified from the early
1990s. Not by coincidence, the presidential candidate who is leading in the
polls is Luiz Ignacio da Silva, a longstanding opponent of privatization
and deregulation.

Only in Colombia is a full-fledged internal war under way. But even
Venezuela's much less violent political convulsions -- under the corrupt
populism of Hugo Chavez -- certainly block its economic recovery and
threaten U.S. oil supplies.

The impact of the global economic slowdown, with its low commodity prices,
is most severe in the poorest countries -- Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Yet even Mexico, for all its economic and political progress of recent
years, is suffering the consequences. The sharp fall in exports to the
United States has stymied growth and shrunk government revenue --
undermining the best intentions of its government to relieve poverty.

That in turn explains the surge in illegal immigration, which collides with
the new United States preoccupation with border security, although Latin
Americans are almost universally our friends in every way rather than
U.S.-hating terrorists.

The United States government has reacted with spectacular inattention to
these vast events, whose consequences are serious and could easily become
much worse.

With scarcely a minute of the president's time since Sept. 11, and not much
more from his Cabinet officials -- even the Treasury secretary has found
reasons to virtually ignore Argentina's collapse -- policy has inevitably
drifted.

The obvious objection to more U.S. activism is that Latin America's
problems are structural and cultural; critics argue that more United States
action would be useless.

As for economic aid, any large increase is fiscally impossible and could be
appropriate in any case only to help the poorest Andean countries.

But that overlooks the political and psychological dimension of U.S.-Latin
America relations: Even visits by mere undersecretaries, let alone Cabinet
officials, raise the morale of local reformers, force decisions on
outstanding issues and provide opportunities to solve problems in open markets.

It is on that score that the charge of gross inattention can be proved:
This month, the 1991 Andean Trade Preferences Act, designed to promote
legal alternatives to cocaine production, expired in Bolivia, Colombia,
Ecuador and Peru because of Senate objections engineered by the textile lobby.

The White House could easily overcome that weak lobby with a small fraction
of the president's time and political leverage. Even that has been denied,
however, as if to prove to our neighbors that we are indifferent to their
plight.

Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, D.C. He wrote this for the Los Angeles
Times.