Violent anti-Bush protests mar Americas summit's start (Update)

By Maria Isabel Rivero Nov 4, 2005, 22:56 GMT

Mar del Plata, Argentina - Masked demonstrators riled by U.S. President George W. Bush's presence at an Americas summit clashed with police Friday, while the region's leaders remained divided over how to fight poverty and boost economic growth.

Protesters ransacked banks, set fires and hurled rocks toward a police line protecting the hotel where Bush and 33 other leaders opened a two-day summit. Riot police replied with tear gas and rubber bullets, then moved in to break up the protest.

The violence erupted after a peaceful rally at a stadium in this seaside resort, where Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - Bush's nemesis in Latin America - said U.S.-backed plans for a vast regional free trade area were dead.

'At this summit of the people, we have buried ALCA,' Chavez told some 30,000 protesters in the stadium, using the trade area's Spanish acronym. 'The next objective is the bury capitalism.'

Washington is pushing for a free-trade zone from Canada to the tip of Argentina, but the decade-old project has split the region.

For his part, Bush promoted his free-market agenda as the two-day summit got under way. For example, he said, Latin American countries should take steps like fighting corruption to encourage foreign investment.

'When a government fights corruption, that government sends a signal to investors - large and small - that this is a good place to take risk,' he said.

But Bush is deeply unpopular in Latin America, where many see him as spearheading U.S. dominance of the region and as a warmonger for invading Iraq.

Chavez, a friend of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, recently called Bush 'Mr. Danger' and accuses Washington of wanting to kill him and invade his country - charges the United States calls 'ridiculous'.

The summit's official theme is fighting poverty and strengthening democracy by creating jobs - an effort to sidestep divisions over the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

FTAA foes include heavyweights Brazil and Argentina as well as Venezuela and several others, all of whom oppose even mentioning the free trade area in the two-day summit's final statement.

Bush and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner made no apparent progress during talks Friday, which Kirchner described as 'clear, serious and sober'.

Miguel Insulza, secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, suggested that the most burning issue for Latin Americans lies elsewhere.

The question is whether recent economic growth can last and whether it will benefit the 200 million Latin Americans living in poverty, Insulza told the leaders at the opening session.

Luis Alberto Moreno, head of the Inter-American Development Bank, urged leaders to break the 'vicious circle' of economic development that he said has widened the region's gap between rich and poor.

At the protest rally, also attended by former Argentine football great Diego Maradona, Chavez said he would try to steer clear of Bush at the summit and urged other leaders to do the same.

Despite Chavez's well-known rhetoric, Bush told American reporters earlier that he would treat the Venezuelan politely if the two leaders cross paths.

'I will of course be polite - that's what the American people expect their president to do,' Bush said. 'If I run across him, I'll do just that.'

A key obstacle for the Americas free trade plan is a deadlock at world trade talks over farm subsidies, which Latin American countries are pressing the U.S. to cut because they undercut markets for their own agricultural products.

U.S. officials are looking to breaking the impasse on agriculture at a World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong next month as a way of unlocking the FTAA dispute.

While the United States has indicated readiness to concede on the subsidies front, the European Union is still wrestling with the issue.