The worldwide U.S. military-political offensive is manifest in multiple contexts in Latin America. The U.S. offensive aims to prop up decaying client regimes, destabilize independent regimes, pressure the center-left to move to the right, and destroy or isolate the burgeoning popular movements challenging the U.S. empire and its clients.

Every Sunday crowds of men, women, and children pack into Centenario Park in Buenos Aires to vent their spleens against banks, corrupt politicians, and judges, to demand justice for victims of political repression, and to organize pot-and-pan banging demonstrations (cacerolazos) and other audacious forms of political protest. They are distrustful of politicians, trade union leaders, government officials, big business... in short, anything that smells of the traditional power structure in this crisis-ridden country. They are not the black-clad anarchists one might imagine. They are middle-class professionals, merchants, office workers, housewives, students, those caught in the corralito--the severe banking restrictions imposed in December 2001 to stop a run on accounts--and voters who cast blank ballots to protest congressional by-elections in October 2001.

The turmoil in Argentina and the collapse of the ten-year link between the peso and the dollar has revived the debate about currency regimes for emerging-market economies. Was Argentina wrong to adopt the link in the first place, or wrong to try so hard and so fruitlessly to maintain it?

It's a bad day to be banking in Buenos Aires. The new president is announcing an economic plan designed to save the country from political and financial collapse. But, while the plan will make many economists happy, it is also likely to wipe out 30, perhaps 40 percent of the savings of many Argentines. Over the past month, people across that country have rioted over less. Argentina, once the economic pride of Latin America, is undergoing political upheaval and potential chaos.

Although images of the riots in Argentina have flickered across our television screens, hardly anyone in the U.S. cares. It's just another disaster in a small, faraway country of which we know nothing -- a country as remote and unlikely to affect our lives as, say, Afghanistan.