US Tries to Stop Chávez Stealing Bush's Thunder

George Bush was visiting a farm cooperative and ancient temple in Guatemala today as US officials tried to stop a five-nation South American trip becoming a de facto showdown between the president and his fierce critic Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president.

"We didn't pack anybody else in our luggage," the White House spokesman Tony Snow commented acidly when asked about Mr Chávez, who has spent recent days whipping up anti-Bush sentiment on his own mini-tour of the region.

Mr Bush was also dogged by protests on his earlier stops in Brazil, Uruguay and Colombia. Around 25 people were arrested yesterday in Colombia's capital, Bogota, as riot police using teargas clashed with demonstrators protesting against the US leader's six-hour visit to the country.

Today, in a break for a round of official meetings, Mr Bush will use his own Marine One helicopter to fly around Guatemala for a series of events, visiting a US military clinic offering basic healthcare and a rural farm cooperative, also taking an archaeological tour of ancient Mayan ruins at Iximche, around 50 miles from the capital, Guatemala City.

However, even the latter has brought unwelcome publicity: Mayan leaders have promised to perform a special cleansing ceremony to clear bad energy left by his visit.

"No, Mr Bush, you cannot trample and degrade the memory of our ancestors," the indigenous leader Rodolfo Pocop said. "This is not your ranch in Texas."

Mr Chávez, who has been using his nation's oil wealth to counter US influence in the region, was in Nicaragua yesterday on the latest leg of his trip.

"The battle between the US empire and the great Latin American people is taking place again," he said in a speech in the colonial city of León, a stronghold of the leftwing Sandinista revolution of the 1970s.

On Friday evening, as Mr Bush flew into Uruguay, the Venezuelan leader held a rally just 30 miles away in Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital, leading crowds in shouts of "Gringo go home!"

Mr Bush, whose final destination on the tour will be Mexico, is making the first US presidential visit to Guatemala since Bill Clinton came in 1999.

The country epitomises the murky history of US relations with its neighbours to the south that makes such tours so controversial.

More than 200,000 Guatemalans died or vanished during a 36-year civil war in which leftwing forces battled the US-backed army. After the conflict ended in 1996, a UN-supported commission concluded that more than 90% of atrocities had been carried out by the military or state-sponsored paramilitaries.

Guatemala remains one of the most unequal in the world, and many people - especially indigenous communities - live in poverty. The country also has one of the region's highest crime rates and is plagued by drug trafficking.

Mr Bush will hold talks with the country's president, Oscar Berger, who is expected to ask the US for more help in tackling drug gangs which have infiltrated the country's police forces and are implicated in a series of murders of politicians and policemen.