Monterrey, Mexico ? Three months after taking office, a deferential President Bush made his debut on the world stage by embracing Latin America.

“I grew up in a world where if you treat your neighbor well, it’s a good start to developing a wholesome community,” he told his 33 counterparts at the Summit of the Americas.

Three years later, Bush is deeply unpopular in much of the region. Latin Americans view him as a distant neighbor at best, often at odds with them about security and trade policies, and aloof from their worst economic and political crises.

When he arrives today in Monterrey for his second Summit of the Americas, Bush will meet a Latin American leadership that has shifted to the left and grown increasingly assertive with the United States as people across the region lose faith in free markets.

Although Latin America is not a global power center, the stakes are high enough.

A popular backlash is growing after a decade of U.S.-backed reforms that have sold off state enterprises and opened markets to foreign competition, benefiting corrupt officials and the wealthy but doing little for the 220 million people — nearly half Latin America’s population — who are poor. The number of jobless has more than doubled in 10 years.

Latin American leaders warn that the transformation of the 1980s, when military regimes long dominant in the region gave way to elected civilians, is at risk because people blame democracy for economic malaise. Violent uprisings and one military coup over the past five years have toppled elected leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.

It was a sense that events were spinning out of control that prompted Canada to call for this week’s extraordinary meeting. The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 as a forum to promote the hemisphere’s most ambitious project: a free-trade zone from Alaska to Argentina. The region’s leaders met again in 1998 and 2001. The next summit was set for 2005, but concern arose that Argentina, the assigned host, was too crippled by financial meltdown to pull it off.

A Greenpeace protester wearing a President Bush mask clenches his fist during a demonstration at the Macro Plaza near the site of the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico. Bush will arrive today for the summit.

Bush will come with an anti-poverty agenda that fits into the meeting’s limited scope. He will urge the summit to set “practical goals that can rapidly improve the daily lives of people in the region,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week.

The president’s “tough love” message, U.S. officials say, is this: Latin America’s problems are political, not economic, and there is little Washington can do if its neighbors fail to strengthen the rule of law and property rights, stop corruption, invest more in education, and lift bureaucratic obstacles to starting small businesses. Democratic countries that progress in these areas, he is expected to emphasize, can compete for a share of $5 billion in Millennium Challenge grants under a U.S. aid program unveiled in 2002.