US: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela reject the open market idea as a means of exploitation by foreign interests, write Patrick McDonnell and Edwin Chen in Mar del Plata
US president George Bush left Argentina before the conclusion of a two-day summit, as key South American leaders rejected the White House's vision for a free-trade zone that would stretch from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America.
Fierce opposition from the presidents of the continent's three largest economies - Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela - thwarted the resuscitation of the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA.
"There are two points of view on the continent," said Argentine foreign minister Rafael Bielsa, referring to the five dissenting nations, including the smaller countries of Uruguay and Paraguay. The five nations account for more than half of the continent's economic activity.
Senior US administration officials immediately disputed the notion that the session was a failure for Mr Bush, noting that 29 of the 34 participating nations favoured the trade pact, and that the summit's final documents called for further talks next year. But coming amid fading poll numbers for the president back home, some observers called the collapse of the talks another disappointment for the president.
"I don't think Bush would have gone down there if he knew he'd run into this kind of opposition," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington. "The FTAA may not be completely dead, but it's close to dead - and the body's twitching."
President Bush's principal South American antagonist, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, deemed the outcome an unequivocal victory for critics who say open markets can lead to further poverty by opening the door to plunder by powerful foreign interests.
"The great loser today was George W Bush. The man went away wounded," a triumphant President Chavez told reporters, alluding to the president's quick departure. "You could see defeat on his face."
Throughout much of the day, mystery surrounded the fate of the proposed free-trade zone, as ministers huddled behind closed doors in an effort to craft a solution.
Several news conferences called to discuss the summit's final document were postponed.
At one point, it was rumoured that Mr Bush, hopeful of a definitive final statement, would stay beyond his scheduled 4pm departure time. That turned out not to be true: Air Force One lifted into the azure sky above the choppy Atlantic just a few minutes behind schedule - and before the document was finalised.
The final summit document, completed six hours after deadline, included two distinct views: the opinion of Washington and the 28 other countries that backed the creation of the trade accord; and the five dissenters' view that the imposition of a hemispheric free-market zone would harm certain countries.
"The conditions do not exist to attain a hemispheric free-trade accord that is balanced and fair with access to markets free of subsidies and distorted commercial practices," the dissenters wrote.
A third point, put forward by Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, commits officials to "explore both positions" during a future meeting.
In the end, a summit that was meant to be a symbol of hemispheric unity showcased just how polarised the issue of free trade has become, more than a decade after the pioneering North American Free Trade Agreement brought down commercial barriers between the United States, Mexico and Canada.
The fiercest debate of the sessions focused on the hemispheric treaty, an idea that has been on the table for more than a decade but hasn't advanced much beyond the talking stage. The Bush administration hoped to change that this weekend.
Carrying the sword here for the Bush administration was a close ally, Mexican president Vicente Fox, who began the day with a news conference that included an impassioned plea for approving the free-trade scheme before time ran out.
"If we keep losing time, if we keep reinventing the wheel, if we keep discussing the same ideas without deciding, the only ones we are sacrificing are our poor," declared President Fox, who maintains that free trade with the United States and Canada has brought jobs and improved living standards to Mexico.
The Mexican president urged leaders of the 29 participating nations in favour of hemispheric global integration to go ahead with their plans, even without the five dissenting nations. Representatives of Argentina and Brazil, the continent's major agricultural producers, insisted that they favoured the concept of economic integration. But they said they fear that their products cannot easily compete with heavily subsidised US foodstuffs.
Complicating matters throughout the discussions was the summit's heavily politicised shadow struggle: that confrontation pitted Bush, mired in a second-term slump and extremely unpopular in Latin America, against Venezuela's President Chavez, a fiery populist and acolyte of Fidel Castro.
On one very visible level, the debate disintegrated into a kind of mano a mano between Bush and Chavez, a turn of events that tainted the entire discussion, even if the much-anticipated face-to-face meeting of the two never materialised.