Bolivia Alert

Bolívia seems to be heating up.

Publius Pundit posts a bunch of pictures of unrest in the more capitalist, less indigenous "Half Moon" provinces of the East, and takes a hard anti-communist line, asserting that President Evo Morales is now a Cuban and Venezuelan pawn. He also paints the strikes as a success, and civil war as imminent.

The International Herald Tribune takes a much more guarded view, sourced to the AP.

What Brazil, the powerful neighbor, does, may be crucial. Morales nationalized the gas industry, controlled partly by Brazil's Pétrobras energy company, and for all President Lula's leftist image, the military still has its own concept of national security. That concept is not likely to embrace an imporverished communist Bolívia, or a failed state wracked by civil war, on its southwestern border.