Riot police fire tear gas to disperse some 300 demonstrators throwing stones and Molotov cocktails near the Hermitage hotel in Mar del Plata, where the IV Summit of the Americas opened. US President George W. Bush was set to discuss languishing free trade talks with divided Latin leaders at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas.
(AFP)
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US President George W. Bush was set to discuss languishing free trade talks with divided Latin leaders at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas here.
Bush has been buffeted by anti-US protests and dogged resistance to his bid for pan-American free trade.
Riot police fired tear gas on the gathering's first day Friday as demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, lit bonfires and smashed shop windows outside the plush hotel where leaders were meeting in this Atlantic resort city.
Hundreds of protesters in ski-masks confronted police after a larger group of some 40,000 rallied peacefully at a football stadium to voice their anger at Bush's foreign and economic policies.
The US leader, faced with record low popularity at home as well as abroad, acknowledged the tensions after meeting with Argentine President Nestor Kirchner.
"It's not easy to host all these countries. It's particularly not easy to host, perhaps, me," allowed Bush, whose motorcade whisked past the protests.
Federal police said 64 people were arrested in the clashes, in which a bank and nearby shops were torched. By late Friday, street violence had subsided and a security source said the situation was "under control."
In Buenos Aires, protesters covered the Obelisk, the capital's central monument, with a banner declaring "Bush Get Out". Demonstrators burned a US flag nearby.
"He is getting what he has coming," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said of Bush in Santa Clara, Cuba. "He is the most unpopular US president, in the international arena, in history." Communist Cuba was not invited to the summit.
Long gone are the United States' Latin American neighbors' Cold War-era cooperation and deference; many elected governments since have moved to the left, including in key nations Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela.
Market reforms and a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) touted by Bush have encountered growing skepticism amid persistent unemployment and poverty across the Americas.
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, a virulent critic of Bush and close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, repeated his accusation that Washington was plotting to invade his oil-rich country.
"An imperialist invasion of Venezuela will be the start of a 100-year war," Chavez told the crowd, speaking for more than two hours under driving rain.
Among anti-US activists here were Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel; the populist frontrunner in Bolivia's presidential race, Evo Morales; and Argentine football idol Diego Maradona who received a rapturous ovation.
Earlier, Maradona called Bush "human rubbish" in comments to AFP as he traveled to Mar del Plata from Buenos Aires in a special train.
On arrival, Chavez, who has boosted his international profile in the region with his coffers flush with petrodollars, announced: "the FTAA is dead and we are going to bury it here."
Officials struggled to agree on the wording of the final declaration to be adopted Saturday, as leaders were split on whether to mention the FTAA in the text.
The United States, as well as Canada, Mexico and Central American governments had pushed for negotiations on the project to resume next year but opponents say the United States needs to open its agricultural markets.
While Bush said this week that efforts to create the FTAA were "stalled", he said Washington still wants to push a free trade agenda with other American countries.
In thinly veiled criticism of the United States, the Argentine president warned that trade agreements had to take into account the gap between rich and poor countries across the region.
"An agreement cannot be the result of an imposition," Kirchner said.
The vast Americas region is divided with Canada and the United States among the richest nations in the world, while some 220 million of Latin America's 512 million residents live in poverty.
Some 96 million people in the region survive on less than one dollar per day, according to the United Nations.
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