Latin America's elites embrace Chilean leader - Groups in six Latin American nations admire Chilean President Lagos, dislike President Bush and back free trade.
Influential leaders throughout Latin America still dislike President Bush but are shunning ideological extremes and embracing Chile's moderate socialist President Ricardo Lagos as a pragmatic model for the region, according to a poll commissioned ahead of a Miami gathering this week.
Lagos is the president whom the so-called elites admire the most, while Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came in second, according to the survey, which was commissioned by The Herald and the University of Miami's School of Business and conducted by the New York-based Zogby International.
The six-country poll of business, government, media and political leaders also showed that attitudes toward free trade were generally positive; that China was better liked than the United States; that economic optimism was on the rise; and that the least liked presidents were Peru's Alejandro Toledo, Bush, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
When asked which leader represented the best model of leadership for the continent, Lagos, who has signed a free-trade agreement with Washington, obtained 32 percent. Lula da Silva, a moderate leftist who is battling a corruption scandal at home, got 18 percent. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative and close U.S. ally credited by many Colombians with bringing down violence in the country, was third with 12 percent.
http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=11864
It seems that Latin America is rejecting the policies or American conservatives and Republicans that have hampered that continent for decades, and have now embraced a moderate socialist style of govenrment, closer to the governments of Western Europe in nature than to the U.S.
Interesting...