…through free trade. It’s put Mexico on the world map as a player, while Venezuela grows ever less significant. The Fox-Chavez spat just brought it all to everyone’s attention. Investor’s Business Daily has the editorial here.

Meanwhile, via Boz, I read in Marcela Sanchez’s pretty good column of the critical need for free trade and all the Neanderthals in Washington who are blocking it. She’s right, but doesn’t mean they should not be fought. The whole story is here.

Andres Oppenheimer hit a true home run, one of his best columns, called ‘Chavez Started It’ describing what went on at that summit and how free trade voices were drowned out by the dictator of Venezuela. In explaining that Fox was ambushed, Oppenheimer writes:

From what I saw in Mar del Plata, and heard in interviews with several Latin American presidents during the summit, Fox was speaking for most visiting leaders, who felt their voices had been virtually censored at the summit. Many of them were fuming.

They were irked at the fact that Ch????vez — flanked by former soccer star Diego Maradona — was allowed to speak live for nearly two hours at the ”Counter-Summit” organized by a congressman who supports Argentine President N????stor Kirchner, in front of 40,000 people waving Cuban and Venezuelan flags, while the microphones of the official summit were turned off after the Argentine president’s inaugural speech.

Worse, many presidents complained to me privately that they could not even invite journalists to their hotels for interviews because of stricter-than-usual security measures. The net result was that while Ch????vez and Maradona were lashing out against Bush and his Latin American ”lackeys” on live television around the clock, the other presidents couldn’t get their views across to the public, they said.

It’s a don’t miss, read it here.