A popular man - but can he forge working relationships with Latin American leaders? [Reuters]

Barack Obama, the US president, is due to attend the quadrennial Summit of the Americas on the lush tropical island of Trinidad.

But this will not be any relaxing Caribbean holiday for the president. Instead, Obama is flying into a storm or criticism from his hemispheric peers. 

Latin American leaders are angry over the US's role at the centre of the global economic downturn, a crisis that has hit their countries harder than many others.

Over the past five years, the region's economies boomed, with growth rates higher than anywhere else on earth.

Millions of Latin Americans rose out of poverty for the first time. Now, all those gains are threatened by the prospect of a protracted downturn.

Political motives?

South America's biggest economy is Brazil - a country highly dependent on exports of commodities such as iron ore, soybeans and sugar.

Prices for all of those commodities have nosedived as global demand has dried up, leaving Brazil in a deep recession and Luiz Inacio Lula De Silva, the Brazilian president, hopping mad.

Last month, Lula blamed "white-skinned people with blue eyes" for causing the crisis.

This week, following a meeting with Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president, Lula lashed out again, comparing the global economic system to the Titanic, with the rich nations taking the developing world down with them to destruction.

The Brazilian leader, a former lathe operator and labour union leader, said he spent his life warning that the global financial order needed to be reshaped. 

"Now I have seen it with my eyes what has happened, this system that has crashed," he said.

Obama will also share the stage with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, the long-time antagonist of US foreign policy who spent the days before the summit globe-trotting to Iran, China and Cuba.

Then there is Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista rebel leader who fought US intervention during the era of Ronald Reagan, US president for much of the 1980s; and Evo Morales, the coca-chewing president of Bolivia who has ejected US drug agents from his nation's soil.

Spotlight on Cuba

Neither of the Castro brothers will be in Trinidad, since membership in the hemispheric club is limited to democracies.

Cuba is not officially on the agenda, but US-Cuba relations will undoubtedly be discussed on the sidelines.

Obama will be pressed to move further and faster to dismantle the quixotic US embargo.

He inched towards that by loosening travel and remittance restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island, but that was rightly seen as a small step.

It is also, arguably, a discriminatory and unconstitutional step: How can a single group of American citizens be given privileges based solely on their ethnic background? 

Ambivalent attitudes

Can Obama repeated the public relations success of the G20 summit? [AFP]

There are a few signs of change under Obama. The president visited Mexico on his way to Trinidad, in an effort to show solidarity with a government teetering on the brink of destabilisation in its battle with the drug cartels.

And Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has finally acknowledged the obvious US role in the cataclysmic narco-violence that has convulsed the region, admitting that the US's insatiable hunger for drugs and its role as the supplier of guns south of the border are major aspects of the region's problems.

Obama's special adviser for the summit, former US diplomat Jeffrey Davidow, told the Washington Post newspaper earlier this week: "He [Obama] is going to Trinidad with the intention of listening, discussing and dealing with his colleagues as partners."

Obama will try to repeat the public-relations success of his recent trip to Europe, where he charmed leaders and populations without really achieving any of his goals of getting the Europeans to spend more stimulus money and send more troops to Afghanistan. 

But it might be a harder sell to leaders such as Lula, Chavez and Ortega.