Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, at a time when that country was under U.S. economic and military influence.  Today, Bolivia has a social-democratic government under an indigenous president, Evo Morales, a powerful voice for world change.  Latin America as a whole has moved decisively to the left, with Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva feeling sure enough of his international status to team up with Turkey to offer Iran a way out of its fuel reprocessing problem.

So what can we expect from the death of Osama bin Laden?  It will not take 40 years for the Muslim world to complete its transition to modernity, with its own version of social democracy.

Commentators are just now catching on to the fact that the upheavals in the Middle East are partly between Sunni and Shi’a, and partly between nationalists, modernists and tribalists.

Whatever happens, let’s not try to implement former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘snowflake’ memo quoted in his recent book: Lets “pick ‘eight or ten important countries, asking ourselves what we would like them to look like five or ten years from now, and then fashioning plans to achieve that.’

It’s just been announced on TV that the government will release a photograph of bin Laden’s body.  Just like it did with Che. Let’s not repeat a century of interference in Latin American in the Middle East.  Let’s turn our energies toward home, and create our own social democracy.

As ash from an Icelandic volcano continues to blanket the skies of Europe, canceling tens of thousands of flights for the 5th day in a row, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when several natural disasters of this mag-nitude happen simultaneously.

There is no place to run to. All we can do is hope that the movement started by Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, to defend the planet against climate change, will spread faster than the disasters in store, galvanizing massive resistance to the world as it is threatened today.

Ten years ago, while Americans nodded in front of TVs that extolled the benefits of commercially owned pure water, rural Bolivians rose up to protest the privatization of their lifeline. It was a bloody fight, but they won, setting the stage for the eventual coming to power of an indigenous small coco grower.

This week, President Morales is hosting a week-long World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth; government representatives from 54 countries will join thousands of grass roots organizations from all over the world near Cochabamba, where the Water Wars took place. They aim to make the next UN Conference on climate change, due to take place in Mexico later this year, more meaningful than December’s Copenhagen climate summit.

Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. (the U.S. and Bolivia no longer have reciprocal representation), Pablo Solon, explained on today’s Democracy Now, that the developed nations, though representing only 20% of the world’s population, “occupy” with their toxic emissions, 80% of the earth’s atmosphere. In that context, the idea of a Mother Earth is not a primitive image.

Listening to Amy Goodman interview the sister of the slain leader of the water wars, Oscar Romero, tell how the Andean peasants won the water war, it occurs to me that part of the reason for their success was that they were free from a ubiquitous media that claims all is well in the best of worlds. Unlike citizens of the developed world, they believed in their own understanding of right and wrong, and acted upon it.

Americans will never have free water, but what about a government that winds down military involvements in favor of better health care? In this week’s Nation, Michael Klare tells us that the Pentagon is planning for “Two, Three, Many Afghanistans”, increasing its ability to combat “sub-versive insurgencies”. Under the heading “subversives” are people fighting for equal access to the basic underpinnings of life: clean air, water, food, fuel.

As a first step in that war, President Obama announced it was cutting the $3.5 million dollars of aid Bolivia was slated to receive to help it combat climate change.