Who is the Least Popular President in the Americas? Not Bush...

The Colombian think tank CIMA has released its annual poll on governance and related issues. The results are culled from interviews done all over Latin America, the U.S. as well as Spain and Portugal, and assess various issues of importance to the region. Specifically, the group did 12,401 interviews in virtually every country in the Western Hemisphere, plus Iberia, and the results are pretty interesting.

Some of the highlights:

• In 11 out of 22 countries, the respective leaders had more than a 50% approval rating. The highest was Alvaro Uribe in Colombia with 85%. Bush, with a rock solid 21% approval, was surprisingly not the lowest. That honor went to now ex-President Nicanor Duarte of Paraguay, with an impressive 9%. Other notables: Chavez with 54%, Lula with 67%, Ortega with 29%.
  

• Overall in the region, the three main problems identified were lack of security, unemployment, and corruption. Complaints about the economy tended to vary depending on the respective conditions in each country. Only 3% of Venezuelans considered the economy a major problem, while 50% of U.S. Hispanics felt the same way.
  

• One strange question was asked about all the leaders in the region. On a scale of 0 to 100, how much do you sympathize with any given leader? For Hugo Chavez, 58% of Venezuelans sympathized with him, while only 10% in Spain felt the same way. Overall in the region, Chavez had a 26% rate of sympathy. When asked about Bush, 46% of U.S. Hispanics sympathized with him, while 56% of Colombians did the same. This stat is clearly not approval rating, so I’m not really sure what to make of that question.
  

I think overall these numbers should be looked at with a very critical eye. It appears the wording of this poll may have skewed some of the results, and allows one to read the numbers in ways to fit certain political views. For example, El Universal in Venezuela, which is not exactly pro-Chavez, gleaned from these statistics that Chavez was the “most unpopular” leader in the region. But he doesn’t have the lowest approval ratings? In any case, the report is a good read…