By GEORGE RUSSELL /EDITOR, TIME LATIN AMERICA

or TIME's Latin American bureau chief Tim Padgett, the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, was an opportunity for a fascinating exercise in nostalgia, for two reasons. The first is that Padgett, a nine-year veteran of covering the region, once for Newsweek and now for TIME, well remembers the original summit gathering of all the democratic leaders in the hemisphere, which took place in Miami in 1994. "All the optimism about Latin America's modernization turned out to be hyperbole when the Mexican economy crashed two weeks later," Padgett recalls.

As part of his preparation for this scene-setting cover story, Padgett dropped in on a hemispheric meeting of trade ministers and other senior officials in San Jose, Costa Rica, last month. "What impressed me most," he says, "was the glimpse of a new self-confidence on the part of Latin American officials when dealing with their U.S. counterparts--which I think we'll see more of in Santiago."

But Padgett's second reason for waxing nostalgic is even more piquant. A dominant theme at the Santiago summit is education, and in the process of preparing our special report on that topic, Padgett discovered that not only he but all five of TIME's stringers and local correspondents working with him had served as teachers in Latin American schools.

"In the 1980s, I was a volunteer teacher of English and history at a school in one of the hillside shantytowns ringing Caracas," Padgett recalls. "Brazilian reporter Jack Epstein taught in Mexico and Brazil, while Sol Biderman taught university for 16 years in Sao Paulo state. Santiago stringer Elizabeth Love taught in Mexico and Chile, Colombia stringer Cathleen Farrell taught in Bogota, and Costa Rica stringer Christine Pratt was once a rural Peace Corps schoolteacher in Costa Rica."

Atop that expertise, TIME's crew had another special interest in the education aspect of the summit story. "Many of us," Padgett says, "are raising kids in this region." We think their special experience--and that extra interest--are well reflected in this week's coverage.