LATIN AMERICA:Domestic constraints hampered President Bush's efforts to win friends and influence people on his tour of Latin America, writes Tom Henniganin São Paulo
As public relations offensives go, it was not one of the US's more successful campaigns.
US president George Bush is back in Washington, and if not exactly empty-handed after his week-long trip to Latin America, his advisers will hardly claim they succeeded in their aim of showing that his administration does care for a region where resentment at perceived US neglect is strong.
Given the deeply ingrained anti-Americanism that pervades much of the region, and the open hostility of most on the continent's left, any US president coming to Latin America must expect noisy demonstrations that turn violent - images which accompanied Mr Bush on every stop.
But what made the US president's trip such a damp squib and which gave a resonance to the taunts of critics like Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who spent the week shadowing Bush across the region on a "counter-tour", was the fact that domestic concerns prevent him from making the sort of concessions that would genuinely win his administration some Latin good will.
On the Brazilian leg of the tour Bush hailed an agreement with his hosts to promote ethanol as an alternative fuel. But on the issue that really mattered to the Brazilians - that the US drop its $0.54 tariff on ethanol imports - he could offer nothing except a blunt admission that the subject is not even up for discussion.
Brazilian ethanol is hugely more competitive than its US equivalent.
But despite Bush's green rhetoric of using ethanol to reduce dependence on (tariff-free) oil imports, US ethanol production is a lucrative subsidy for corn farmers in mid-western states, who have a well-organised lobby in Congress and play a crucial role in selecting presidential candidates by means of the Iowa Caucus.
For ethanol in Brazil, read immigration in Mexico and Guatemala, the last stops on the tour. The rise of nativist anti-immigration sentiment in Mr Bush's own party has so far prevented him from implementing a new humane immigration policy that takes account of the reality of more than one million Mexicans as well as other Latinos attempting to cross into the US each year.
The failure to offer any movement on immigration during this tour leaves this deeply emotive issue as a wedge between Bush and Mexico's right-wing president, Felipe Calderón, whose ideology is otherwise far more in tune with Bush's conservatism than most other presidents in left-leaning South America.
Even Guatemala's president, Oscar Berger, was willing to speak out forcefully on the immigration issue, despite his country's economy being hugely dependent on the US through preferential trade agreements and aid.
But, as in Mexico, the relentless movement of Guatemalans north is a massive issue in a country where an estimated 10 per cent of the population now lives in the US.
It was not all bad news for Bush. He received a warm welcome in Uruguay, where growing disillusionment with neighbours and regional allies is inching the small republic diplomatically closer to the US.
In Colombia he lauded the achievements of his strongest ally in the region, President Àlvaro Uribe, who has used massive US military aid - in dollar terms the most for any country outside the Middle East and Afghanistan - to extend government control over a country plagued by drug-financed Marxist guerrillas and the paramilitaries who fight them.
But even here there was a cloud - the US Congress is asking far tougher questions about the continuation of aid to Colombia following the exposure of links between allies of Uribe and the paramilitaries, responsible for many of the worst atrocities in Colombia's bloody violence.