US/LATIN AMERICA: When he arrived at the White House a year ago, George W. Bush was the first US president since John F. Kennedy to put Latin America at the top of his foreign policy agenda.
But the region all but disappeared off his radar screen when suspected Islamic militants flew passenger aircraft into New York's tallest skyscrapers and the Pentagon on September 11th.
The Bush administration hardly batted an eyelid when Argentina, Latin America's third-largest economy, slid into default and social chaos in December, foreign policy experts said.
The abrupt shift in US priorities toward defence and security in the war against terrorism has forced Mr Bush to forget his cherished goal of much closer ties with neighbouring Mexico, the experts said.
"Bush was an isolationist when he arrived at the White House. He thought the world stopped at Mexico, because that was all he knew," said Mr Ricardo Israel, a Chilean political scientist. "September 11th changed all that."
President Bush's interest in Latin America, highlighted by a state visit to Washington by Mexico's President Vicente Fox just days before the September attacks, raised great expectations south of the border.
Yet a plan to build a hemispheric free trade bloc stretching from Alaska to Patagonia, first conceived during his father's presidency, now looks more complicated.
"The promises are still largely promises, with no concrete action," said Mr Arturo Valenzuela, a National Security Council adviser on Latin America during the Clinton administration.
Welcoming Mr Fox in the White House garden on September 6th, President Bush said the United States had no more important relationship in the world than that with its southern neighbour.
Five days later, struck by the worst attack on American soil, the United States turned to its traditional military allies of the last century.
The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, became the President's most important partner in the drive to root out terrorism in Afghanistan.
"It's an irony of US policy. Bush was really enjoying closer ties with Mexico," said Prof Russell Crandall, who teaches Latin American politics at Davidson College, North Carolina. "This was amigo diplomacy: meet at the ranch and discuss the issues over a barbecue."
The main issue was a solution for millions of illegal Mexican immigrants working as cheap labour in the United States, on farms, in factories and in service industries.
President Fox wanted to move toward free movement of labour, like the European Union, within the North American Free Trade bloc.
Mr Bush, who gained unprecedented support for a Republican from Hispanic voters as governor of Texas, had campaigned for the White House pledging a better deal for Mexicans.
He had managed to change the Republican Party platform to be more immigrant-friendly, with an eye to the fast-growing Latino electorate.
But an immigration agreement with Mexico, today the United States's second trading partner after Canada, has stalled in the new context of heightened security concerns.
"That's dead. You cannot talk about open borders when you are cracking down and checking every truck coming across the border," Prof Crandall said.