RE: South American election news

I've always found South American politics to be interesting, even if not very meaningful. For as long as I have paid attention to it (going back to the early 1970s), it has always been a pendulum, sometimes swinging from far left to far right in less than a year. In the early 1980s, the Chilean government's number one activity seemed to be killing off its own people. In Bolivia, the back-and-forth always seemed to be between those who wanted to eradicate the Indians and those who wanted to free them (from what was never very clear). South American politicians are amazingly transparent and almost always paranoid, vis-a-vis Mr Morales:

At the time, Evo Morales - who will take office on Sunday - had called it a US plot to weaken Bolivian defences.

The US has ever been the bogeyman for South American socialists (and more than a few fascists). I think it safe to say that Bolivia's defenses and their relative strength is pretty far down on the US military's list of concerns.