A plastic-explosives bomb went off in downtown La Paz, Bolivia, today, killing two people at a hotel. An American and a supposedly Uruguayan woman were arrested. Police say they have confessed to doing it.

The event is strange in itself. Miguel B. at MABB noted (well, until he changed his post!) that this hasn’t happened on a regular basis since the military regime in the 1970s. I recall one car bomb in front of Petrobras headquarters in Santa Cruz in the past year but that is all. There’s a whole lot of chaos in Bolivia, but it’s not the kind of place where bombs go off. What’s more, even if they did go off, they’d most likely be dynamite, due to contact points with the mining industry. The plastic explosives aspect makes it all even stranger. Like … where … would such rarified explosives come from and why would they be used anyway in the land of dynamite? When dynamite could do as much damage and be less traceable?

I checked Agencia EFE and Prensa Latina, and got some interesting clues. President Evo Morales had just gotten done blaming the U.S. for sending ‘terrorists’ over to bother poor Bolivia. He went on about how military coups were always preceded by ‘terrorism.’ It made me wonder if a setup for the possibly hapless American was on the cards. After all, Morales had just called him a U.S. agent. Meanwhile, Prensa Latina, the Castroite news agency, said that the Bolivian terrorism bore an amazing resemblence to that employed by ex-CIA, ex-Cuban, semi-Venezuelan Luis Posada Carriles. Prensa wrote:

Analysts today noted the similar modus operandi between the Carriles-masterminded bombings of Havana hotels in the mid-90s and the terrorist attacks Tuesday night and Wednesday morning on hotels in La Paz, Bolivia.

Yeah, sure. As many ‘analysts’ as you want to make up, Prensa! Obviously, the Cubans wanted the CIA blamed for this. Both Morales and his Cuban pals were squarely blaming it all on the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. embassy condemned the bombing.

The American who was arrested was listed in different news stories as Claudio Lestat d’Orleans, and Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo, among other things. I Googled the guy and only got strange references to fairies, which at first glance, I figured was some unrelated teenage girl thing and probably a coincidence. I Googled Lestat alone and got vampire references and Anne Rice novels. Well, that didn’t seem to do much good either.

Then I went to Eduardo‘s site, where it turns out it had all kinds of relevance. The guy is a freak from up in California’s northern nut country, and his real name is Triston Jay Amero. Or well, I guess. Depends on how far you go back.

The guy is a wicca priest, an accused petty defrauder, a liar, a Satanist, and cripes, everything that makes you go blech. He seems to have spent time in places like Paradise and Placerville, California, up there by the northernish Nevada border, a place where communists, potgrowers, survivalists, Earth Firsters and rightwing gun nuts all live happily side by side, not one of them normal. Oh, I am sure there are normal people there, too, it’s just that, being an ex-Northern Californian, the ones I met were the other kind.

Eduardo has tons more information from Google searches on this nut now facing jail in Bolivia, and his post here, as well as the other related ones, are absolute must-reads, fascinating as can be, laying all the strange puzzle pieces and details out. Thus far, based on what we know, it looks like a Bolivian jail’s the best place for this kind of guy.

What’s important after this is how the U.S. and Bolivia develop their relations after that. Can a wack-job like this prove to be an excuse to Evo Morales to consolidate power? In a place like Bolivia such things could be possible. The political situation is the one from which we’ll see some developments, and soon.

UPDATE: Alvicho at Off Topic has some important analysis, asking whether Morales’ reaction – blaming Bush, blaming ‘oligarchs’ and blaming his opponents is a sort of vehicle for consolidating power. It’s a very provocative question, and has lots of further details – read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Gay Orbit has a first-rate summary and analysis of the whole thing here.

UPDATE: And don’t miss La Ventanita‘s additional thoughts here.