First, some personal news. I just got back to the US after four months in Japan, but I’ll be back to Tokyo in August. Ahh, the intrepid travels of your average 21st century Viceroy.

Next, the first headline I saw on google news upon getting into the country was that President Morales of Bolivia is making more trouble. Just a week after he unilaterally changed the oil and gas development contracts with foreign companies investing in Bolivia, he’s now moving on to target landowners.

Morales lines up land owners as next target

Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, on Thursday ruled out compensating foreign energy companies that face changes to their contracts as a result of a controversial nationalisation policy announced earlier this month. Speaking at a summit of Latin American and European leaders, the defiant leftwing president, accused foreign companies of pillaging his country for hundreds of years and warned that large landowners were the next target of his radical reform agenda.

“We’re not going to limit ourselves to hydrocarbon resources”Â?, Mr Morales told a packed news conference. “There is also huge land ownership, especially unproductive land, in our country.”Â?

Earlier this month, Mr Morales shocked foreign investors by sending in the army to gas fields to underline his move to nationalise the country’s energy industry. Companies have been given 180 days to renegotiate their contracts. Some energy companies, for the time being, have to pay royalties of 82 per cent to La Paz, rising from 50 per cent. Only a year ago, companies paid royalties of 18 per cent.

On Thursday, Mr Morales indicated that companies could receive compensation for physical assets taken by the state, but that they would not be indemnified for losing their concessions.

The irony of the anti-Washington rhetoric is that the companies suffering under the new regime are primarily European.

Mr Morales described foreign energy investors as “smugglers”Â? and argued they had broken Bolivian laws and paid no taxes on their profits. “We don’t have to talk, dialogue or negotiate when it comes to the policy of a sovereign state,”Â? he said.

Let’s see how you like it when they pull out of the country, stop investing in Bolivia, and foreign investment dries up leaving only subsistence agriculture.

He also pointed to a looming clash with the country’s judiciary who have been criticised by the leftwing government for failing to impose laws to protect national interests. “For us, the judiciary are the representatives of the colonial state, not the people,”Â? Mr Morales warned.

Silly courts and the “rule of law.” What does the president need with courts and judges when he can just take whatever he feels like?

Analysts said the president’s message was all the stronger for being delivered in Europe, where many of Bolivia’s biggest energy investors are based. Spain’s Repsol, Total of France and Britain’s BP and BG Group are among the largest foreign energy groups in the country, along with Petrobras of Brazil.

I’m glad to say that Mexican President Vicente Fox has called a spade and spade:

Mr Morales drew criticism on Thursday from Vicente Fox, the Mexican president, who highlighted the sharp differences among latin American leaders by describing nationalisation as a “terrible”Â? path. “I think that far from putting the economy in the hands of the state, you have to put it in a market with social responsibility”Â?, he said.

The bottom line: I stand by my original prediction. And with that, I’m off to catch some much-needed sleep.

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