SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - Long gone are the days of heavily armed revolutionaries wandering the jungles of Nicaragua or Bolivia and the cry of "Yankee Go Home!" on the streets of Latin America.

Since the end of the Cold War, military dictatorships have vanished and the region for the most part has embraced capitalism and American-style democracy. But that doesn't mean it's at peace with El Norte, its powerful northern neighbor.

When President Bush arrives this week at the Argentine seaside resort of Mar del Plata for the fourth Summit of the Americas, leftist activists, students, Indians and trade unionists will gather at a basketball stadium several miles away to protest everything from the war in Iraq to U.S. immigration policy to free trade deals.

"We think his policies are totally contrary to what we want for Latin America and are promoting genocide, domination of workers and their communities and the plundering of natural resources," said Argentine labor leader Juan Gonzalez, who is heading the "People's Summit" coinciding with Bush's visit Thursday through Saturday.

It's nothing Bush hasn't run into in Europe. But in play here is a complex history, rife with nationalist impulses, in which the United States is viewed as an economic magnet, valued as a donor of aid totaling nearly $1 billion a year, but detested as imperialist. The latter sentiment has been exacerbated by the war in Iraq.

Most Latin American governments opposed the war, and only Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic overrode protesting publics to send troops or police to Iraq. The 380 Salvadorans are the only ones still there.

When Bush took office, some Latin Americans welcomed the former Texas governor, cheering when he chose Mexico for his first presidential trip abroad and when he proposed an initiative to ease illegal migration with a guest-worker program. But the idea dropped off the radar after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush has also tried, with little success, to revive former President Bill Clinton's goal of a Free Trade Area of the Americas that would include all 34 continental and Caribbean countries participating in this week's summit.

Another free-market deal, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), has fared better. Bush got it through Congress, but opposition was tough.

"You can say CAFTA went through, but what it revealed is that free trade is on life support," said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.

Aid produced mixed results

The United States continues pouring aid money into Latin America and the Caribbean. It gave $894 million last year and will spend $983 million this year for programs to fund education, feed children, promote democracy and fight drug trafficking.

A quarter of that money goes toward the drug war, with mixed results. Many Latin Americans believe the problem wouldn't exist if the United States wasn't a market for drugs. Colombians complain that despite their efforts to combat cocaine production, they have all ended up stereotyped as drug dealers.

And experts wonder how Washington will deal with Bolivia if presidential front-runner Evo Morales wins the Dec. 4 election and follows through on pledges to decriminalize coca farming and industrialize production. Morales himself grows the coca leaves from which tea -- and cocaine -- is made.

It may take years of active U.S. engagement in Latin American issues to repair the relationship, said Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist with the Latin American Faculty of Social Science in Santiago, Chile.

For now, Bush is getting points simply for promising to show up at Mar del Plata because, Shifter said, "there was a lot of speculation he wouldn't."