It seemed as if the radar on the White House was not already clogged. Finally it began to turn. Now he gathers vital signs to the south of our borders. Perhaps that's why in a period of only one month the administration Obama programmed several visits of high level to the region.

In separated trips, the State Department, Hillary Clinton, and that of Internal Safety, Janet Napolitano, they went to Mexico to meet there tall Mexican officials and to discuss with them increasing drug trafficker - violence in this country and to plan a common strategy to fight the problem.

For his part, vice-president Joe Biden went to Chile and Costa Rica. In the latter country it took part in a mini summit of one day with Central American leaders in which they discussed, between other things, the negative effects of the immigrants' deportation from the United States. On the 16th and 17th of April the President Barack Obama also will go to Mexico to have bilateral meetings with his companion Felipe Calderón, before flying towards Trinidad and Tobago for the fifth Summit of the Americas.

For Obama this will be one of several meetings of high profile with world leaders since it began his presidency it does justly three months. But for the heads of state in Latin America and the Caribbean Sea the summit will be an opportunity for that they have been waiting for time. It will be the first meeting with an American president for that they wait it will pay more attention to a series of matters of common interest.

During the last eight years many leaders in the region have complained about being ignored. Although the president George W. Bush said at the beginning of his first order that Latin America would be a priority – and his first trip like president went to Mexico - after 9-11 the region was extracted of his radar. Bush was present at the last three summits, even at a special meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2004, but that did not manage to contain the drastic changes in the region during this period, including an increasing antiNorth American wave.

The today Latin America is not the same of eight years ago. More tendencies or more leftist governments exist that never earlier, including to El Salvador, which has just chosen the first presidential candidate of the leftist party FMLN. Some governments, like those of Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have had tense relations with the United States, and Venezuela seems to do of the hostility against the American government one of the axes of his revolution bolivariana.

Nevertheless, according to José Miguel Insulza, General Secretary of the Organization of the American States, OEA, all the Latin-American countries, without importing his political ideologies, wants to carry on business with the United States. “Even the surveys that indicate suspicion with the United States, show that what the people want is to be an associate of the United States”, says Insulza. “Nobody wants to grow to the back of the United States, what they want is a politics that he considers to be also his interests”, he tells.

“ The president Obama said a very clear phrase with regard to his relations with the world”, said to me Insulza in a recent interview. “We do not want to do politics for you, want to do politics with you”, it added. This is exactly for what one expects from Obama when it should meet others 33 members of the OEA in Trinidad and Tobago.

There are many matters of common interest in the region that will be discussed during the summit. Between them: the poverty, the crime, the traffic of illegal drugs – that not only fond of Mexico - the global warming, the energy, the immigration and how to face to the global economic crisis that has braked the growth supported that the region has come experimenting from 2002.

A contest point during the summit will be of course Cuba, the only country in the region that is not a member of the OEA. Several heads of state of South and Central America have visited the communist island in the last months in a support sample and several Defense Secretaries of the region have done called the United States so that it raises the sequestration against Cuba.

“In this first meeting”, points out Insulza, “the most important thing the tone of the cooperation will be. We hope that during this fifth Summit of the Americas, the tone of the multilateralismo should reign over the unilateralismo tone like the one that we have known till now of the United States”. (c) 2009 by Maria Helen Salinasuden to finish the brutal slaughters that have the Mexicans living in a virtual state of siege.

(c) 2008 by Maria Helen Salinas.