Bush Continues on Latin America Tour

President Lauds Ethanol Deal With Brazil

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President Bush Visits Latin America
President Bush wraps up his five-country, weeklong tour of Latin America focused on trade, aid, education and technology.

ANCHORENA PARK, Uruguay, March 10 -- President Bush said Saturday that his administration is working to put a halt to law enforcement abuses of new anti-terrorist intelligence-gathering powers, and he expressed continued confidence in the attorney general and FBI director.

"These problems will be addressed as quickly as possible," Bush said at a news conference during a stop here on his six-day Latin America tour.

In his first comments on the matter since the Justice Department released an inspector general report uncovering misuse of laws passed after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush said he was briefed last week before leaving Washington and demanded that his aides figure out how to stop improper intrusions into privacy.

"My question is what are you going to do to solve the problem and how fast can you get it solved," he said.

The president praised the inspector general for "good and necessary work" and added that he was pleased that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller moved quickly to respond. "He took responsibility as he should have," Bush said. "I've got confidence in Director Mueller, as I do in the attorney general," Alberto Gonzales.

But Bush defended the need for tools such as the national security letters, which are used by the FBI to demand information from businesses and individuals without the court order normally required for a subpoena. Such methods, he said, are "important to the security of the United States" as it tries to track down and capture terrorists.

The domestic issue intruded on the second day of Bush's trip to the region, which is taking him to Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. Bush hopes to use the tour to persuade Latin Americans that he cares about entrenched poverty and other "social justice" issues in a region that has felt neglected for years by Washington.

But his travels have been shadowed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the flamboyant anti-American leftist who staged a massive anti-Bush protest in nearby Buenos Aires on Friday night and cried out, "Go home, Gringo!"

Bush flew by helicopter Saturday morning to the scenic, woodsy, waterfront ranch of Uruguayan President Tabare Vasquez to share a beef lunch and discuss trade. For the second day in a row, Bush was asked by a reporter why he refused to even utter Chavez's name and he again avoided answering the question, instead saying he wanted to present a positive and constructive message to the region.

Bush arrived in Uruguay on Friday night after a day in Sao Paulo, where he announced a new energy partnership with Brazil to promote wider production of ethanol throughout the region as an alternative to oil, the first step in an effort to strengthen economic and political alliances in Latin America.

The agreementwas crafted to expand research, share technology, stimulate new investment and develop common international standards for biofuels. The United States and Brazil, which make 70 percent of the world's ethanol, will team up to encourage other nations to produce and consume alternative fuels, starting in Central America and the Caribbean.

The new alliance could serve not only to help meet Bush's promise to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption but also to diminish the influence of Chavez, who has used his country's vast oil reserves to build support among neighbors. Analysts have called it the beginning of a new OPEC-style cartel for ethanol makers, a characterization U.S. officials dispute because they say they want to expand, not control, production.