There Goes the Neighborhood; American clout with its neighbors has hit a new low, warns Mexico's ex-foreign minister.

Byline: Jorge Castaneda (Castaneda is Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University.)

The last week of June was probably the Bush administration's worst period ever in terms of Latin America policy. Its nemeses in the hemisphere--Venezuela's Hugo ChAvez, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador's Rafael Correa and perhaps soon Guatemala's Alvaro Colon and even Argentina's Nestor Kirchner--form an increasingly cohesive coalition and are reaching out to rogues on other continents. After neglecting Latin America for five years, Washington's influence is at a low point. And its new rival, Russia, is gaining ground.

George W. Bush's troubles begin with immigration. When his reform plan recently collapsed, with little prospect of revival before mid-2009, the response from down South was immediate: Mexico and the countries of Central America issued a strong statement blasting the U.S. Senate for rejecting the bill. Many Latin American countries see immigration as a fundamental foreign-policy issue.

What Latin Americans are likely to get next is the worst of all worlds: all the enforcement and border-security mechanisms proposed in the reform legislation with none of its sweeteners, such as legalization programs for unauthorized workers and visas for temporary ones. What will this mean? The number of deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border for the first half of 2007 was 256, more than any year since 1998 and a clear indicator of what's to come. Crossings will become more expensive and more dangerous, but probably not more scarce.

Bush also got bad news on another issue: the status of a pending free-trade deal with Colombia. Despite persistent lobbying by President Alvaro Uribe and the striking of a deal with the Democratic Congress over renewed financing for Plan Colombia, the controversial drug-enforcement and counterinsurgency package in place since 1999, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel announced on June 29 that they would block the trade deal due to human rights, trade and strategic concerns. Uribe--Washington's closest ally in Latin America, as he recently called himself--was outraged.

At the same time, the leader of Latin America's other faction was courting new friends. ChAvez, angry at his Mercosur colleagues for not backing ...