Who's minding the Latin beat? Changing politcal realities in Latin America require U.S. attention, not intervention. (margin notes).

WHILE MOST AMERICANS HAVE RIGHTLY BEEN focused on the war in Iraq, a rapidly changing political landscape closer to home also merits careful attention. Exhausted by long experiments with free market policies, facing evaporating government support of basic social services, and confronted by new armies of the unemployed, several Latin American nations have veered to the left, completing another leg in what's become a historical cycle of political change in the southern hemisphere.

First Venezuela and now Ecuador and Brazil elected new leaders who have defiantly called into question Western programs for economic development and poverty eradication. Argentina appears likely to be the next to ignore the outstretched hand of the free market in order to explore different economic models less likely to require the sacrifice of another generation of its citizenry. These political developments suggest that it is time for a reassessment of U.S. policy in the region. It's likely that the Bush team has people working on the issue right now.

And that's precisely what worries a lot of folks in Latin America. A quick show of grizzled hands at the Bush White House would indicate a number of aged, one-time cold warriors recycled from the Ford, Reagan, and Bush the elder administrations. These men--who helped orchestrate previous south of the border hits like the Contra War, political repression in El Salvador, and the Cuban embargo--are now confronted with the challenge of composing a new relationship between America's north and south, one that will presumably make some note of the fact that the world has changed much since the fall of the evil empire.

At the persistent urging of the U.S. and International Monetary Fund, during the 1980s many Latin American nations embraced "neoliberalism"--a broad economic strategy based in aggressive privatization and wide open economies. Now many are waking up to the reality that they are no better or even worse off than when they began their neoliberal binge.

The hangover has been especially gruesome in Argentina. Just a few years ago a largely middle-class nation, millions there are now unemployed, 60 percent live below the poverty line, and hunger-related illnesses more typical of drought-stricken Africa are appearing among the most vulnerable.

Like medieval barbers reaching again for a bottle of leeches to "cure" their anemic patients, the I.M.F. and U.S. are likely to prescribe more free market strategies to awaken the southern economy, but our Latin American brothers and sisters may have economic plans of their own to try out. The question is will big Tio Sam let them? The long history of U.S. interventions in the region and the Bush administration's lackluster reaction to an attempted coup in Venezuela last year have many worried that the northerners may be tempted to return to the good old days of regular U.S. meddling.

If they indeed move away from northern development strategies, these nations can find some philosophical solace in the social teachings of the church, which has long been concerned with the West's tendency to idolize the free market.

Pope Paul VI worried over the "international imperialism of money," and social encyclicals argue that economic systems are constructed in service to humankind, not the other way around. Although the church offers little by way of specific teaching on the intervention of powerful nations into the affairs of smaller neighbors, Pope John Paul II, in opposing first sanctions then a "preemptive" war against Iraq and the embargo of Cuba, has resisted the idea of any one nation making a unilateral interference into another.

DESPITE ITS WILLINGNESS TO GET IN EVEN DEEPER IN Colombia and attempts to influence electoral outcomes in Bolivia and Nicaragua, there is cause to hope that the U.S. may be less inclined to interfere in a post-Cold War Latin America. Though the administration has sent mixed signals, there is little to indicate a direct campaign to remove the most radical of the new breed of Latin leaders, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and last February Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. was "not proud" of its role in Chile in the 1970s.

Let's hope the future does not offer more opportunities for the U.S. to be "not proud" of its role in our complex hemispheric neighborhood.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.