Mad Bomber in La Paz

Here is a bit of our local news that probably didn’t make your local news:

Last night, as I was walking home from church I walked past the Chilean consulate just around the block from my house, and I couldn’t help but notice a larger than usual contingent of heavily armed policemen guarding the consulate. I wondered what was going on. This morning as I watched the morning news report on TV I found out what: they’ve captured the bomber from yesterday and he said that his next target would have been the Chilean consulate. Turns out that our mad bomber is a 22-year-old kid married to a 40-something woman from Uruguay. According to the police report on the news, this kid has a Saudi father and a Bolivian mother with US citizenship, so he has three passports. In his American identity he uses the same Lestat name as the main character in Anne Rice’s “Interview with a Vampire” novel, and listed his occupation as a “Pagan Priest.” In his Saudi identity he’s supposedly a 30-something lawyer. In his Bolivian identity he sells explosives. His Uruguayan wife even posed nude holding a box of dynamite in an advertisement for their explosive business. Also according to the news, this guy has been kicked out of both Uruguay and Argentina for terrorism and was reportedly the one behind all of the ATM bombings in Buenos Aires last year. Of course, since one of his three citizenships is from the United States, Evito is all over it like stink on a dog. Evo had claimed publicly that the US government in general and W Bush in particular sent this Lestat creature to Bolivia specifically to destabilize the country and sow terror. The new Bolivian chancellor/court jester said that Bush had sent this clown to assassinate Evito himself. Now that’s responsible statesmanship. My Bolivian friends have said that now that Evo and his crew have accused Bush of sending an assassin to kill them, that he really should send an assassin to do the job right. “Please” they said. But in all seriousness, so far there’s no apparent motive for these bombings in La Paz – no political agenda, no potential for income. I figure insanity can be his only cause. Leslie figures that with the whole killing people by bomb modus operandi, the kid must have been auditioning to be Bolivia’s next vicepresident, since that’s how our current vicepresident got the job – by bombing the American Embassy, killing the marine guards, back before the embassy was the fortress that it is today.

Also today in the news, we here in Bolivia are commemorating 127 years of having lost our sea coast to Chile. For some reason, Bolivia feels that they’re closer than ever to getting the sea back now that Chile and Bolivia both have socialist presidents. I don’t know – I’ve lived and worked in Chile and I know that they’re pretty proud of the fact that they whipped both Bolivia and Peru in that Pacific War of 1879 and I don’t believe that they’d give back any territory willingly. Plus, I’m pretty sure that the residents of Arica would not appreciate switching from being citizens of the richest, most developed country in South America to being citizens of the poorest and least developed. Further, it’s not clear to me, or to anyone with whom I speak, just which territory with a sea coast Bolivia might acquire from Chile. I hear them pushing for Arica – but Arica was Peruvian territory before the war. Would Chile give to Bolivia what used to be Peru’s? How would Peru feel about that? Or should Chile give Bolivia back Antofagasta, a chunk out of the middle of Chile, cutting Chile in two pieces? Then would Chile give Arica back to Peru also, just to tidy things up? And if Chile gave all that territory back to Peru and Bolivia, should they demand that Argentina give Chile back the territory on the other side of the Andes that Argentina annexed way back when? Is the goal to get back to the original configuration of the South American countries as originally drawn up at independence from Spain? But if that did happen, Bolivia would more than double in size, having lost over 50% of its original territory to various wars with all of their neighbors over the past couple hundred years.

Speaking of Chile and Argentina, attached is a photo that I took along the border between southern Chile and Argentina, that I took during our family's Christmas trip to the Chilean and Argentine patagonias. Amazing, isn't it?