It looks like the radar on top of the White House is not stuck anymore. It finally started to rotate. Now it even picks up signs of life to the south of our border. Maybe that's why in a one-month period the Obama administration programmed several high-level visits to the region.

On separate trips, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano traveled to Mexico to meet with officials there to discuss the growing drug- 
related violence in that country and to plan a common strategy to combat the problem.

Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Costa Rica for a one-day minisummit with Central American leaders, in which they discussed, among other things, the negative effects of the deportation of immigrants from the United States. On April 16 and 17, President Barack Obama also will go to Mexico to hold bilateral meetings with his colleague Felipe Calderon before flying to Trinidad and Tobago for the Fifth Summit of the Americas.

For Obama, this will be one of several high-profile encounters with world leaders since he began his presidency just three months ago. But for the heads of state in Latin America and the Caribbean, the summit will be an opportunity they have been awaiting for some time. It will be the first meeting with an American president whom they hope will pay more attention to a series of issues of common concern.

For the past eight years, many leaders in the region complained of being neglected. Although President George W. Bush said in the beginning of his first term that Latin America would be a priority -- and his first trip as president was to Mexico -- after Sept. 11 the region fell off his radar. Bush did attend the past three summits, including a special session in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2004, but they didn't do much to contain major changes in the region during that period, including a growing anti-American wave.

The Latin America of today is not the same one as eight years ago. There are more leftist or left-leaning governments in power than ever before, including in El Salvador, which just elected the first leftist presidential candidate, representing the former rebel group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN. Some governments, like those of Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have had tense relations with the U.S., and Venezuela seems to have made hostility toward the U.S. government a cornerstone of its Bolivarian Revolution.

Yet, according to Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States, all of the Latin American countries, regardless of their political ideology, would like to do business with the U.S. “Even those polls that show a high level of mistrust toward the United States also show that most people want to be a partner of the U.S.,” said Insulza. “No one wants to grow in the shadows of the U.S.; what they want is a policy that also takes their interest into consideration.”

“President Obama put it best in one simple phrase,” Insulza told me in a recent interview. “'We do not want to make policy for you, we want to make policy with you.'” That is exactly what will be expected of Obama when he meets with the other 33 members of the OAS in Trinidad and Tobago.

There are many issues of common interest in the region that will be discussed during that summit. Among them: poverty, crime, drug trafficking -- which affects not just Mexico --global warming, energy, immigration and how to deal with the global economic crisis, which has slowed the sustained economic growth the region had been experiencing since 2002.

A point of contention during the summit is sure to be Cuba, the only country in the region that is not a member of the OAS. Several heads of state from South and Central America have visited the communist island in the past few months in a show of support, and several ministers of defense from the region have called on the United States to lift the embargo against Cuba.

“In this first encounter,” said Insulza, “the most important thing to look out for is the tone of the cooperation. We hope, during this Fifth Summit of the Americas, there will be a tone of multilateralism and not the tone of unilateralism that we have heard up to now from the U.S.”

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2009 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate