My brother is living in La Paz, Bolivia right now, which is not the calmest place to be at the moment. He and his friends have taken the following pretty impressive pictures. If only they’d use Flickr rather than other picture services. Here you go: Lake Titicaca and environs, Cochabamba and environs, and the Festival del Gran Poder in La Paz itself, a festival of folklore, dancing, and parades, during which the people have set aside political arguments– we’ll see how long the break lasts.
Politically it seems to me that the senate’s compromise– high taxes on foreign investment in hydrocarbons, but not nationalization– seems like a good one, since nobody is happy with it. The test will be whether the various interest groups are willing to accept that the other side is equally unhappy, and that’s an outcome that doesn’t look easy to predict.
Secretly Ironic 