'Yankees keep out of Latin America'

BUENOS AIRES - An ex-colleague was recently kidnapped in Buenos Aires. During his 24-hour ordeal which included being driven at 130km/h and the emptying of his bank accounts, he had two fears.

One was that his captors, high on crack, would crash the car. The other was that they would not believe his desperate attempts to assure them he was not American, and slit his throat.

Last week in the city, I spoke in an exaggerated British accent to my driver. We sat at the lights watching the varied and ingenious efforts of the beggars to get cash. Everything was here - flower sellers, jugglers, people dressed as Charlie Chaplin. Varied, ingenious ... and desperate.

Argentina is a test case for just how bad things can get when policy-makers screw up. The "market liberalisation" on US lines led to a huge trade deficit and poverty. Five years ago Argentina defaulted on its debts and the peso was devalued by 75 per cent.

To anyone with Western cash, even now, an apartment in the city centre costs little more than a vegetable allotment in Britain, while lunch is the price of a coffee in New York. But to Argentinians, the value of savings and wages fell dramatically.

But there are optimistic signs. GDP growth last year exceeded 9 per cent, and the retail sales numbers for the Christmas period show an extraordinary 46 per cent rise.

President Nestor Kirchner shocked economists a few weeks ago by announcing Argentina had repaid its entire US$9.8 billion ($14.3 billion) debt to the International Monetary Fund.

Free trade is seen as anything but in Argentina, as it is throughout Latin America. Moreover, it is seen as an instrument of US imperialism.

The free market policies of the 1980s and 1990s are blamed for the economic crisis of 2000. Now, nearly 40 per cent of the continent lives below the UN poverty line; almost 20 per cent subsists on less than a US$1 a day.

Against that background, in November US President George W. Bush blundered into the Americas in Argentina summit, brandishing his "Free Trade Plan".

But free trade has a dirty name, and many Latin American leaders are snubbing American interference.

The latest is Bolivia's new leader, Evo Morales. They, along with a freshly popular Fidel Castro, are forming what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela calls "an axis of good".

James Monroe, the US president from 1817 to 1825, once told Europeans to keep out of Latin America - "the United States' backyard". Well, that backyard now has a giant sign hanging over it. It reads, "Yankees keep out".

- INDEPENDENT