Right after signing a hellish pact with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, Bolivian President Evo Morales signed a decree nationalizing the natural gas fields of Bolivia. Color this country gone as a serious energy player now.

Morales sent in troops to take over the assets of companies like BG, Total, Petrobras and Repsol-YPF. Exxon Mobil, too was hit. He did it on communist day, which is May Day.

Obviously, he’s pretty confident that the Western aid spigot will always be running for him. And obviously, he’s pretty sure that what happened to his mentor, Fidel Castro, won’t put an embargo in place to cut him off from the rest of the world. Not that he doesn’t want that of course. Castro got himself a 40-something year-long embargo after brazenly confiscating the assets of American citizens, among other crimes. Morales, who gets $120 million a year in government support from the U.S. – well over half the Bolivian government’s budget, seems to be following in the same footsteps and is very confident that energy prices will always remain high.

This is suicide. Read the first news account of the very ugly takeover spectacle (it even involves gas stations run by independent Bolivians) here.

BLOG ROUNDUP:

Alvicho at Off Topic has tons and tons more, plus lots of great photos about this major story here.

Miguel Buitrago at MABB has a HUGE news roundup along with links to other bloggers blogging this topic. Big news indeed.

Inka-Wolfy at Lobo en Peru has some excellent original material from the Peru side of things, along with President Toledo’s reaction to this horror show. Be sure to click on just to see the picture of Morales next to a mural of Che Guevara. Hideous!

Francisco Toro correctly forecasted this kind of thing at Caracas Chronicles, when no one else was, saying Morales was going to have to get mean early to hang on to power. I searched his site for the reference and it looks like he erased all but an indexed fragment of it – damn, it was a good bold and accurate forecast. Anyway, you can see a bit of it here.

Academic Elephant at Elephants in Academia has an excellent narrative writeup and analysis of the whole thing here.

Eduardo Avila at Barrio Flores has a copy of the actual decree signed by Morales (in Spanish) here.

Harry Hutton at Chase Me, Ladies has his own take on Bolivia here.