U.S. IS PREOCCUPIED AS LATIN AMERICA ERUPTS

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - With the United States focused on the war
against terrorism, long-simmering problems in Latin America have
boiled over.

Those woes could force President Bush to pay the sort of attention to
America's closest neighbors that he promised during the presidential
election campaign.

. Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, has erupted into
open warfare against Marxist rebels who are deeply involved in the
drug trade. Government troops have started retaking by force a swath
of the country that was ceded to the rebels in a December 1998 bid
for peace.

. Argentina is in a state of near-collapse and has defaulted on more
than $141 billion of government debt that it owes to investors in the
United States and elsewhere.

. Oil-rich Venezuela, the third-largest supplier of crude oil to the
United States, is close to anarchy, with army officers rebelling
against leftist President Hugo Chavez, the CIA and State Department
warn.

. Even in Brazil and Bolivia, countries that are following the
Washington blueprint for economic reform, anti-Washington
presidential candidates lead opinion polls.

Many experts on the region think U.S. inattention comes at a big price.

"If there is one lesson one can walk away with from Sept. 11, it is
when the U.S. is distracted, it is not very good for Latin America,"
said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a
Washington research center on the Americas.

Bush To Visit Peru

Hopes rose in Latin America in 1994, when President Bill Clinton held
the Summit of the Americas in Miami and elected leaders from the
region pledged to create a hemisphere-wide free-trade zone by 2005.

Yet Clinton's attention faded. For most of his second term, the chief
policy adviser for Latin America -- the assistant secretary of state
for the region -- was never formally appointed.

It took President Bush a year to get Otto Reich approved as assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. There was no
ambassador to Brazil, Latin America's largest country, for Bush's
first year in office. One finally will arrive in April.

The absence of a clear policy leader for Latin America has left many
governments in the region adrift, said Stephen Johnson, a Latin
America policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative
research center in Washington.

"There has to be a fence post against which countries developing
their markets and democracies can lean," said Johnson.

In decades past, Latin American nations looked to Washington for aid.
Now they are asking for trade, in the form of preferential market
access like Mexico enjoys under the North American Free Trade
Agreement. Access to the U.S. market gives countries the incentive to
sign on to the market reforms that America demands and to turn away
from producing illicit drugs.

The presidents of Peru, Colombia and Bolivia are expected to push for
trade concessions when they meet Bush in the Peruvian capital of Lima
on March 23.

It will be the first visit to the poor Andean nation by a U.S.
president, and the Andean nations will seek trade preferences to
offset the income their citizens are losing by not cultivating coca,
the plant from which cocaine is made.

"The presence of Bush in Lima on March 23 is a great opportunity" to
press for a new agenda, said Harold Forsyth, Peru's ambassador to
Colombia.

Increasing U.S. Role in Colombia

Colombia itself could force the entire region back onto Washington's
radar screen. Its civil war threatens to spill refugees and drug
production into neighboring countries Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil,
Bolivia, Panama and Peru.

In early February, the Bush administration announced it wanted to
provide almost $100 million to train and arm a brigade of the
Colombian army to protect a pipeline that moves gas to a Caribbean
Sea port for export to the United States.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana also has asked the Bush
administration to lift a stipulation in the $1.3 billion Plan
Colombia aid effort that restricts the use of U.S. military hardware
to anti-drug efforts. The Bush administration is broadening
intelligence sharing with the Colombian government and speeding up
the delivery of replacement parts for Black Hawk and Huey helicopters.

The increasing U.S. involvement in Colombia's conflict makes some
Latin Americans nervous, remembering decades of U.S. meddling and
covert action during the Cold War era. The United States has promised
that combat troops will not be directly involved in Colombia, but the
advisers, military hardware and intelligence raise questions about
where anti-narcotics efforts end and prohibited counter-insurgency
involvement begins.

"Everybody knows that in Colombia it is very, very difficult to draw
that line of distinction," said the Brazilian official, who was
understanding of the Bush administration's quandary. "You know how
sensitive public opinion is in Latin American countries to an
American military presence in the region."

The Bush administration appears willing to take any heat for a higher
profile in Colombia. U.S. military officers accompanied Pastrana on a
tour late mast month of the former safe haven of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia.

"There is going to be an attempt to sell a broader presence than we
now have in Colombia," predicted Coletta Youngers, senior associate
at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights lobby in
the capital. "That is going to be spark tremendous debate."