US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaves Friday on a tour
of Chile, Indonesia and Australia, to meet Latin American leaders
and address Southeast Asian security issues.
In Chile, her first stop, Rice will attend Saturday's
inauguration of Michelle Bachelet, the first woman to be elected as
Chile's president and a Socialist.
According to State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, Rice
will take advantage of the occasion to talk with some of the 30
Latin, African and European leaders who will also attend the
ceremony in Valparaiso, 120 kilometers (68 miles) west of
Santiago.
There, Rice will meet for the first time newly-elected Bolivian
President Evo Morales, the first native person to head the South
American state.
Morales is also a socialist as well as a leader of coca farmers,
who stronly oppose US drug control policies in the Andean
state.
"We hope to have good relations with Bolivia," Rice told a US
congressional panel Thursday.
"The United States has no problem with governments being elected
that are left or center or dealing with governments that are left
or center," Rice, a key member of US President George W. Bush's
conservative government, said.
She told a group of Latin American journalists, however, that
she has no plans to meet with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez, who regularly trades verbal barbs with the Bush
administration.
Rice had planned to travel to Peru on Sunday, but canceled the
visit in light of President Alejandro Toledo's planned trip to
Washington this coming weekend where he will meet Bush at the White
House.
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Rice will stay over in Chile before jetting across the Pacific to
Jakarta, for her first visit as secretary of state to Indonesia,
the most populous Muslim nation in the world.
There, she will discuss the "war on terror", building democracy
and regional security.
Bilateral relations, which have been strained in the past over
the situation in East Timor, improved after the massive US aid
effort to survivors of the December 2004 tsunami, which killed
168,000 Indonesians.
After a White House summit in May, Bush and Indonesian President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono agreed to closer military cooperation.
The top US diplomat will also visit Australia for the first time
as secretary of state, and will hold strategy meetings with her
counterparts in Australia and Japan.
The visits to Indonesia and Australia had been planned for
January, but Rice moved them back after a stroke incapacitated
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
(Chinadaily.com via agencies March 10, 2006)
