I made a brief mention of it but in case you have not heard that if you plan on traveling to Bolivia then you are going to need to apply for a visa. I have some thoughts on the matter but since Jim Schultz at Blog from Bolivia actually knows what he is talking about so I'll let him go first:
First, a source within the government told me that the visa applications will be handled in the US by the dozen Bolivian consulates, not just the embassy in DC. That spreads out the work a little more realistically, but it could still generate more than a thousand or so applications per office per year, a huge new workload for short-staffed operations. That source also points out that a good number of the people effected by the new law will, in fact, be Bolivians living in the US who have obtained US citizenship and no longer have a valid Bolivian passport.Here's my take - I agree that it hurts Bolivians a whole lot more than Americans. Consider however, that it is unlikely that those in the US constitute the backbone of Evo's support so he loses nothing in thumbing his nose at US. I am not surprised that the embassy was caught off guard by the announcement. Contacts with people in the Evo gov't were non-existent before his victory - it takes time to build relationships. Finally Schultz falls under the typical lefty delusion that if gringos are nice to anti-gringo gov'ts then all will be well. Some of Castro's most provocative moves have been prefaced by overtures from US. Nationalist appeals fall short if you don't have a threat, specifically one so big and powerful that it is easy to vilify.
Second, news reports here suggest that the new US ambassador to Bolivia, Phillip Goldberg, was caught totally by surprise by the government's announcement. If so, aside from what it says about how the Morales government chose to handle the issue, it also doesn’t say much for the connections the new ambassador has forged with Bolivian authorities. Are relations so strained that no one in the US Embassy had any source that would give the US advance word?
Third, as a diplomatic gesture, the Morales announcement was odd in its timing. Just last week, during a six-senator visit to La Paz, the new leader of the US Senate, Senator Henry Reid (D-Nevada) signaled a serious thawing in US/Bolivia relations. He called Evo Morales a "magnetic personality," adding that Evo, "could be, if things work out right, the best leader this country ever had." Then two days later the Morales government announced the new visa requirements. I don't know if that will have any effect on the presumed warm and fuzzy feelings that Reid was apparently ready to bring back to Washington on behalf of the Bolivian government.
