You know, in those pre-9\/11 days, one of the few hopes I held out for a Bush Administration was that we’d see some serious efforts at integrating the economies of North, Central, and South America.\u00c2\u00a0 Vicente Fox was obviously a Bush kind of guy, and folks like me (or, admittedly, perhaps just me) hadn’t entirely written off NAFTA as something that could actually bring some good to everyone.\u00c2\u00a0 But then comes 9\/11, and that agenda disappears completely.\u00c2\u00a0 US policy towards Central\/South America from 2001-present consists largely of shipping buckets of money to Columbia and getting into pissing matches with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (and the mess that is CAFTA).<\/p>\n
So, Bush is heading down to Central and South America to say, “Oh, sorry we ignored you for the past six years.”\u00c2\u00a0 As usual, we can count on our media to do a bang-up job of covering the issues.\u00c2\u00a0 Here, the WaPo reporter heading along with him promises all the juicy details<\/a> – starting with how *hard* it is to have to wait for your flight at Andrews Air Force Base.\u00c2\u00a0 I suspect we’ll get better news in the comments than the reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You know, in those pre-9\/11 days, one of the few hopes I held out for a Bush Administration was that we’d see some serious efforts at integrating the economies of North, Central, and South America.\u00c2\u00a0 Vicente Fox was obviously a Bush kind of guy, and folks like me (or, admittedly, perhaps just me) hadn’t entirely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-society"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t