As a 17-year-old exchange student in Brazil many years ago, I was encircled at a party early in my stay and asked by an intense young man what I thought of David Rockefeller. In fact I had no opinion worth mentioning of the CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, but could sense that such a response might not be well-received. My questioner and his friends considered Rockefeller the leading symbol of U.S. "imperialism," and soon the conversation staggered to a close.

A few months from now, my 17-year-old daughter - whose language skills and globe-trotting experience far exceed mine at that age - will head to Argentina to stay with a family through part of the summer. She will not face questions about Rockefeller, of course. The bogeyman for Latin lefists these days is George W. Bush, as his trip through the region just proved. Certain things never change, including the desire by some in the Southern Hemisphere to blame underdevelopment on the colossus up north.

As it happens, the decades between my first trip south and my daughter's have battered the radicals' thesis. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez can rail against capitalism and the shackles of U.S. domination all he likes, but such rants sound out of touch to any educated person who looks around and notices which nations are enriching themselves, which are not, and which paths they chose.

The success stories of the Four Asian Tigers, then the galloping growth of China, India and such surprises as Ireland, Latvia and to some extent even Chile simply did not exist when that young man confronted me long ago. If Latin intellectuals have a right to be angry with this nation, it's not for our commercial prowess. It's because even as our officials sermonize about the importance of free trade, they refuse to fully open up U.S. markets.

"Lower tariffs now!" may not be the catchiest rallying cry for the new crop of Latin populists, but it's how the U.S. could actually most help their poor.

Poisoning the process

Imagine your anger if local officials held a public meeting on whether to designate your property as historic and didn't bother to tell you. That's what can happen in Denver - did happen, in fact, last year - and yet officials seem serenely indifferent to calls to change the rules.

At a City Council meeting Monday on whether to designate a small historic district in south Denver, two officials seemed genuinely puzzled that speakers made so much of the notification failure.

We followed the law, explained an assistant city attorney and a staff member of the preservation commission. Property owners must be notified before a public "hearing"; they don't have to notified before an open meeting such as one held last May by the Landmark Preservation Commission where people spoke in favor of designating the district before the three principal owners were even told.

No wonder Elizabeth Potts and her brothers Thomas Wright and Lawrence Wright are still shaking their heads over this shocking treatment, which concluded Monday with a "compromise" - a partial landmark designation - they felt they had no choice but to accept.

No Denver official at a public meeting should ever entertain a formal proposal to designate property for landmark status while the owner is still in the dark. It poisons the process; worse, it's just plain wrong.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.