ANDRES OPPENHEIMER Iraq not the only debatable issue

There is no question that President Bush and Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry did the right thing in spending almost their entire first presidential debate talking about Iraq. But there is no excuse for the fact that they didn't spend a single second on America's neighbors.
On Friday morning, hours after the debate, top Latin American advisers for Bush and Kerry and Latin American dignitaries attending The Miami Herald's Conference of the Americas were shaking their heads in disbelief. They had a hard time understanding how a debate on foreign policy taking place in Miami -- a city where 61 percent of the residents are foreign born, the majority coming from Latin America -- had not even mentioned the worsening state of U.S.-Latin American relations.
Didn't Bush once say that this would be "the Century of the Americas?" Granted, Sept. 11 changed U.S. foreign policy priorities. There are no American soldiers dying in Latin America or Canada, no Islamic terrorist groups that we know there or countries with nuclear weapons. As some Pentagon officials say only half-jokingly, if there is a World War III, it's not going to start in Honduras.
But there are powerful reasons why Bush and Kerry should have spent at least one minute on Latin America. When it comes to the issues that affect Americans' daily lives -- cross-border security, immigration, trade, drugs, the environment and, increasingly, oil supplies -- there may be no region more important than this hemisphere.
Consider:
UOn the immigration front, nearly 3 million undocumented workers are entering the United States every year, the vast majority from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
UOn the security front, growing numbers of Middle Eastern immigrants are coming to the United States by land from Canada and Mexico, posing a potential security threat to the United States, U.S. officials say. Today, it is easier to enter the United States illegally by land than through an airport, they say.
UOn the drug front, more than 21,000 Americans die every year from illegal drugs shipped in mostly from Latin America. That is more than 20 times the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
UOn the trade front, Canada and Mexico are the top two U.S. trading partners, and Latin America is the fastest growing market for the United States in the world.
Three out of the four largest U.S. energy suppliers -- Venezuela, Mexico and Canada -- are in this hemisphere. The rest of Latin America could help reduce U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
UOn the domestic political front, the more than 38 million U.S. Hispanics are already the largest U.S. minority population, accounting for about eight million registered voters. And according to a recent Zogby International poll, 91 percent of likely Hispanic voters say they consider U.S. policy to Latin America an important issue.
On top of all of this, U.S.-Latin American relations are worsening.
An 18-country Latin America-wide Latinobarometro poll released Friday at the Americas Conference shows growing anti-Americanism and disillusionment with free market reforms in the region. Meanwhile, oil-rich Venezuela is preaching radical populism to its neighbors, and violent Indian and leftist movements are gaining strength in the Andes and Southern Cone countries.
Extensive preparation
Nelson Cunningham and Otto Reich, respectively the top advisers on Latin American affairs to the Kerry and Bush campaigns, tell me that, especially because the foreign policy debate was taking place in Miami, their candidates had prepared extensively for at least one question on Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico or hemispheric free trade plans.
So who's at fault? Most likely, it wasn't the candidates but the debate's moderator. PBS' Jim Lehrer, one of the best in the business, did not escape the northeastern U.S. media view of the United States as a white country of British descendants whose interests lie east and west, but not north and south. It's no longer just that.
My conclusion: Iraq deserved to be by far the main issue of the Miami debate. But for many of us who live in Miami, there are other issues close to us that we would have wanted at least to be acknowledged.
X Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.