Few friends for the US in Latin America: By many measures, US Colombia policy has bombed: over the past five years, we've given $3 billion to help eradicate narcotrafficking and terrorism. While some efforts have been successful, the net to the US hasn't: the drug war there all but stalled out, and illegal drug sales here have actually gone up. So when Condoleeza Rice went to that country last week to tell Colombia that the US would maintain current funding levels there, I was surprised to see such a lovefest.

Perhaps this is why: kind of like the distant acquaintance you cling to like a long-lost buddy at a party filled with strangers, the US needs a best friend in a Latin America. Consider recent history: Bush pal Lucio Gutierrez, Ecuadorian president, was ousted last week after a popular uprising. And in the last five years people-powered movements overthrew leaders in Peru, Argentina and Bolivia; and in Brazil, Chile and Venezuela, left-leaning governments now rule. Across Latin America, new left leaders like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez are gaining in popularity, a fact that reportedly has the Bush administration "running scared."

Absent from Rice's itinerary last week was a visit with Chavez, the leader who in April celebrated the two-year anniversary of a failed, US-backed coup. Conventional wisdom says that Condi's visit was explicity to help alienate Venezuela from its neighbors, but as Caracas-based journalist Craig Wilpert told Democracy Now!, that's not what's happening:

[E]very time that Condoleezza Rice criticizes Chavez, his popularity goes up within Venezuela, and probably also to some extent within the rest of Latin America. I mean, it's pretty much a transparent move, what Condoleezza Rice is trying to do is to isolate Venezuela with respect to the rest of Latin America... [I]t's almost the opposite that is happening, that in that process, the U.S. is isolating itself with respect to the rest of Latin America. I mean, Chavez has been signing all kinds of trade agreements and cooperation agreements with every country in Latin America, and he has been really pushing hard for the integration of Latin America. So, the isolation of Venezuela is very, very far from happening.

(You've got to wonder if Colombia's cozy relationship with the US will backfire and end up isolating it from the rest of Latin America.)

And: The Christian Science Monitor on the "new civic activism" in Latin America.