President Bush, in Chile last weekend for an economic summit of Pacific Rim nations, can talk up trade all he wants, but it’s China that’s doing the wheeling and dealing in Latin America at our peril.

Chinese Premier Hu Jintao spent 12 days in the region pledging billions of dollars to close deals in Argentina, Brazil and, yes, Chile. Everything from investing in gas pipelines in Brazil and copper mining in Chile to oil exploration in Argentina. Oh, yeah, throw in Chinese tourists, too.

Meanwhile, Bush’s Americas free-trade agreement goes nowhere as members of Congress, including Republicans, try to set up protectionist roadblocks for their farming interests.

China has been worming its way into Latin America, as more countries turn to socialist leaders for salvation and the Bush administration gets consumed on the terrorism front.

Just last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, meeting in Ecuador with his 33 Latin American counterparts, was calling for some kind of coordination between Latin countries’ military and police forces to secure the region from drug gangs and potential terrorists.

No doubt Latin Americans need better security — kidnappings and murders are way up, and there are reports that suspected Arab terrorists are using Latin America to raise money and to slip through the borders into the United States. And, yes, you need a secure environment for trade and investment.

Having the military assume police duties is not the solution, though. There should be a very clear separation between the two. Certainly citizens of countries like Chile, Argentina and Brazil, which lived through military dictatorships, understand the distinctions.

Not that Bush is solely focused on fighting terror. He has promoted trade with Andean and Central American nations, for instance, and continues to pursue the hemispheric Free Trade of the Americas agreement. But so far, it’s more talk than substantive investments like the ones China has undertaken.

Let’s be clear. China is a U.S. trade partner, but it is not a warm-and-fuzzy friend. It’s a communist regime that, despite its pseudo free-market philosophy, hasn’t budged on human rights for its people and continues to reward party officials and their families with economic plums.

American businesses that trade with China are more than willing to look the other way — they get cheap labor, no real environmental regulation, easy bucks. But as China continues to hold more U.S. investments and help sustain America’s rising federal debt by buying up U.S. dollars, we must wonder: How sovereign is America? And how will China’s growing influence in Latin America affect our hemisphere?

It should give Americans pause that China secures the contract to manage the Panama Canal. Yet it’s all well and good in starry-eyed free-traders’ eyes, even when China has military relations with both Cuba and Venezuela and it’s flying reconnaissance satellites in partnership with Brazil.

But here’s the real smack of irony. It’s not Hu that Latin Americans were protesting in Chile as the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum got under way. On the contrary, Hu is being hailed as a progressive world leader.

It’s George W. Bush who’s the object of derision, the focus of tear-gassed protesters. They decry globalization, which they see as capitalism run amok, widening class distinctions in a region that has never been able to break the logjam between the land-owning haves and the hordes of have-nots. And, of course, the leftist-leaning protesters reject the U.S. war in Iraq, which has also alienated many moderate Latin Americans who used to view the trade potential with the United States with guarded optimism.

Unless Bush elevates the strategic importance of Latin America in his second term and delivers real investments that can help those countries grow a strong and independent middle class, we may be dealing with more than the threat of a few thousand free-trade protesters in the future.

We will be dealing with China calling the shots in our own back yard.

Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.