WASHINGTON, 11 January 2004 — As US President George W. Bush heads to meet with leaders from Latin America, he will find himself in a world that has changed, largely in response to the policies that his own administration put into effect.

Bush is to arrive Monday in Monterrey in northern Mexico for the two-day Summit of the Americas with more than 30 other leaders.

In years past, such hemispheric meetings would follow a predictable course: the United States would swear its eternal friendship to the other countries with the exception of the absent Cuba. The other countries would respond graciously and accept commitments for further US financial assistance, and everybody would go home to resume relations as normal. Everybody would swear to fight the drug lords, and business would go on as usual. Things are different this year.

The Latin American leaders include Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive with strong pro-business leanings who split openly with Bush on the US decision to wage pre-emptive war in Iraq. The Mexican government and Chile, both members of the United Nations Security Council, opposed the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Bush was not pleased. In the eyes of the US government, that sort of defiance put Mexico in the same opposition camp with France and Germany.

Then, too, there are the differences over trade. Some of the Latin Americans — again, Mexico among them — objected to US subsidies and protective tariffs for farmers and steel producers, arguing that they were unfair to competitors in poorer nations.

The US National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, in a briefing at the White House in advance of the Monterrey meeting, tried to gloss over such differences, saying that the meeting would emphasize the close relations between nations of the Hemisphere — with the exception of Fidel Castro’s Cuba — and their devotion to democracy.

Cuba is inextricably linked to another issue that will hover over the Western Hemispheric meeting in Mexico: the American elections in November. The White House has begun a concerted campaign to line up Hispanic voters, the largest minority ethnic bloc in the United States and the group that pushed Bush over the top in the 2000 presidential election. Although Bush lost the popular vote by some 500,000 ballots, he won Florida and the presidency by the strong support of the Cuban-American community, many of them refugees from Cuba.