After a week that saw his domestic popularity fall to a record low, Bush was yesterday struggling to show it had been worth travelling south to face the public taunts of Bush-haters such as Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, and Diego Maradona, the Argentine football star.

Talks at the Summit of the Americas on setting up a hemispheric free trade bloc from Canada to Chile ended in deadlock, and the opposition to globalism was not confined to street protesters.

The two-day meeting in the Argentine seaside town of Mar del Plata was marred by violence that saw more than 1,000 masked youths rampaging though the streets smashing shop fronts, throwing Molotov cocktails and clashing with police in the name of defeating “Yankee imperialism”.

“It’s crazy. Bush is going to fly off, but we’re left with this mess. It’s the poor against the poor, Argentine against Argentine,” said Gonzalo Unamuno, a local student, his eyes streaming with tear gas.

Inside the conference hall, President Vicente Fox of Mexico tried in vain to piece together a free trade bloc of 29 out of 34 countries, leaving the big players from countries who oppose it such as Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela to grandstand about the impact of open markets on impoverishing their people.

“I really don’t know why President Bush has accepted to come to this show of political clowns, where all of them will blame him for all the maladies that we so cleverly produced in our countries,” said one cynical Argentinian.

Bush should have gone to Baghdad, a Wall Street Journal commentator noted wryly: “It’s safer and the leadership there is actually interested in democracy and development.”

Yet, in a reminder that Iraq was still the source of Bush’s problems, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in the conflict, shared a platform with Chavez at a 20,000-strong rally in a football stadium.

Maradona and Evo Morales, the leftist Bolivian presidential hopeful, also addressed the crowds after travelling to Mar del Plata on a train packed with protesters chanting “Fascist Bush! You are the terrorist!” Hours before the summit wound up with two opposing declarations from the rival camps, the American president was on his way to Brazil, where the welcome from leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is unlikely to be much warmer.

Bush’s continuing problems at home were never far behind him, though. It emerged yesterday that White House staff have been ordered to attend a “refresher” course on ethical conduct and the handling of classified material as part of the fall-out from the probe into the leaking of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador and war critic. A memo sent to aides noted that Bush expects his staff to abide by the “spirit as well as the letter” of ethics rules, after Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, appeared in court last week charged with lying and obstruction of justice.

Six out of 10 Americans believe Bush’s confidant, Karl Rove, should resign while he remains under investigation.

Republicans had begun the week buoyed by the nomination of Samuel Alito, a staunch conservative, to the supreme court after the botched nomination of Bush’s friend and White House lawyer, Harriet Miers.

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