On their March trips, both presidents cited what they called very generous aid packages of several billions of dollars in recent years. But this aid is insignificant, except usually for propaganda purposes, when compared to other forms of economic interaction where the United States is light years ahead of Venezuela. Incomparably more constructive are investments, trade and remittances, which of course the Chavistas and many traditionalists condemn as modern exploitation. These include U.S. foreign direct investment of more than $350 billion, twenty times the U.S. investment in China. More than 1.6 million Latins are employed in businesses with majority U.S. ownership. Latin exports to the United States last year topped $330 billion, substantially more than much discussed U.S. imports from China, and remittances last year by Latins working in the States probably totaled more than $60 billion. As for the importance of trade, Chavez pays for most of his anti-American socialism with the billions of dollars he makes from oil sales to the United States at astronomical market prices. Clearly a good "socialist" has to take his cash where he can find it.

U.S. Policy in Transition?

U.S. policy did not cause Latin America's problems, nor can it resolve them, but it can help or impede constructive reform if Latins want it. Besides reforming some of the counterproductive U.S. policies noted above, which no recent president has wanted or been able to do, there are other things we can change. Bush's newly-discovered interest in issues Latins say are at the top of their agendas is a step in the right direction, though in truth it is hard to imagine the United States playing a very active role in substantially improving conditions. Bush's 2007 trip was far more effective than the one to the APEC forum in Santiago, Chile in late 2004. At that time Bush went down swinging like Casey at the bat while a much more personable Chinese President Hu Jintao got something between a triple and a home run on his much longer visit to the region.  

Bush also seems to be taking seriously the need to draw the region's moderate leftist governments, particularly, but not only, the one in Brazil, away from neutrality vis-à-vis Chavez's debilitating demagoguery and populism. Traditional Latin leftists now running several countries have been reluctant to criticize populist leftists like Chavez, though after the people in countries that go Chavista the moderate leftists are the ones who have the most to lose from the spread of Chavismo. To the degree that these moderate leftist countries are succeeding economically, they along with Mexico, Colombia and others are much more indebted to Milton Friedman than Karl Marx. In varying degrees they accept that free trade and markets offer the only productive alternative to Chavez's scapegoating, paternalistic recipe for continuing inequality and poverty.  The more Chavismo wins in Latin America, the more the moderates lose.

So Bush's March trip was the most potentially constructive action he has taken toward Latin America since he took office. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva met with him in Brazil and then again several weeks later in the United States, and cooperative programs for the promotion of sugar-based ethanol were highlighted on the agendas. Part of Lula's incentive in this may be making Brazil the "big" country of Latin America, instead of Venezuela, which is what Chavez is rather successfully pursuing. No matter. In Colombia (and Peru and Panama as well), significant progress in anti-guerrilla wars must now be backed up with the immediate passage of the free-trade agreement before the U.S. Congress. And serious attention to immigration, which disappeared after 9/11, must again be the focus with Mexico. But getting Latin America's moderate socialists and others to even quietly side with the United States on these critical issues will demand U.S. actions, not just words, to prove our willingness to give as well as take for the common hemispheric good.

Despite his links to Iran and Russia, Hugo Chavez is not in the first instance a major threat to the United States, but rather to the well being of Latin Americans themselves. His socialism will further reduce their chances of prospering or even surviving in the modern world and that, more than anything else, will make him a challenge and threat to the interests of the United States. Thus our focus in combating him and his ideas should above all be more constructive attention to the region as a whole rather than direct confrontation with Caracas.

William Ratliff is a fellow and curator at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.