LA Quick Hits: Cholera Kills in Haiti, Juarez (Again), Hugo and Santos, Bolivia - Not So Gassy, Peru Talks Security, PRD Drops Godoy & More

• Cholera outbreak in Haiti kills 150 thus far; not in Port-au-Prince but earthquake to blame. WaPost and LAT also follow story.
• 15 youths dead in Juarez.
• Santos and Hugo to meet in Caracas on October 29.
• Bolivia gas reserves a lot lower than previously believed.
• Colombia, Brazil and Peru talk security (notice the source link and how they play down Chavez nuke plans).
• Peru says FARC is hanging out there.
• Peru talks narcos with Bolivia.
• PRD dumps Godoy. Why did they accept him in the first place. Godoy has ties to organized crime and still sits in Chamber of Deputies. He is immune from prosecution while in office.
• PAN's preemptive strike against AMLO fails - they should just ignore him. They are turning him into a martyr...again.
• Colombia has more fauna under threat than any country in world, save Mex.
• Susana Villaran still has a 14K vote lead in Lima mayoral race with over 88% of votes counted.

Bolivia: Not So Stable

The reliably left wing and pro-Evo opendemocracy laments the growing division and polarization of Bolivia. Of course those nasty elites from Santa Cruz are to blame.

Castro Playbook: Evo Style

Evo casts out the bait and tries to reel in his own Herbert Matthews. Despite the divisions and polarization in Bolivia NYT reporter Simon Romero is impressed by the nation's stability.

LA Quick Hits: Hugo Talks (and Talks and Talks), Nutty Correa, Lula's Plan, Evo is Stuck, Monterrey, Cuba Libre! and More

• Hugo's babfest, Alo Presidente, was back on the air. Hugo told US to "go to hell," spoke of Brazilian babes in string bikinis, the hanging of Saddam, a plan to jack up taxes, raise the famously low price of Venezuelan gasoline and his plan to not pay market value for the nationalization of CANTV (en esp.) - the telecom company.
• FT has a round up of LA. Among the issues explored: Hugo's power grab and insane fiscal policy, Correa's even nuttier fiscal plans and the promising start of Calderon.
• Lula is set to unveil a growth package for Brazil. Among the features of Lula's plan: tax breaks, increased public spending on infrastructure along with other cuts in spending.
  
• Mercosur tabled plans of expansion, despite Hugo's enthusiasm for it.
• CSM begins a very promising series on Calderon's crackdown.
• Calderon's people insisted that they will carry on with the drug war and the AG insisted that extradition of drug traffickers had nothing to do with pressure from US.
  
• Bolivia's constitutional assembly is stuck in the mud and the politics of that country are a mess. Divisions abound and Evo has had to adjust.
• 5 killed by FARC bomb.
  
• 11 Iraqis bound for US were arrested in Mexico.
• Residents of Monterrey are accused of being cheap by fellow Mex. Is it an accident that Monterrey is the most business friendly and entrepreneurial major city in Mex?
  
• Monterrey is finishing off its own "River Walk."
• Who wants a free Cuba? No one but US.

What's at Stake in Bolivia?

Carlos Sabino from the libertarian Independent Institute tries to explain what is so important about what is going on in Bolivia:

What's at stake today in this Andean nation is nothing less than a continental expansion of socialism devised by Hugo Chávez, who has picked up the banner of the Cuban Revolution. If the Bolivians give in to President Morales, they will find themselves living in a foregin-supported tyranny, stripped of their freedom. Democracy will become a simple facade, behind which the worst abuses will be committed. If they struggle on, as everything seems to indicate, the tensions will continue and very possibly lead to violence.

The nations in our region still do not understand that governments like Chávez's and Evo Morales' are a real threat to peace in Latin America as a whole. The fact that Morales won by a temporary popular majority does not mean that all his actions—some of which are openly destabilizing—should be accepted or that his ambitions of imposing his outdated political models on all neighboring countries should be tolerated. Let us hope those nations will soon see the light, before violence erupts in the heart of our continent.

The Bolivian Visa Mess

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.

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.

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.