Bolivia's president-elect continues Latin America's leftward slide.

Bolivia's new president-elect, Evo Morales, has not wasted any time demonstrating his communist revolutionary bona tides and his close ties to dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Fresh from his victory in Bolivia's December 18 elections, Morales launched a world tour that took him first to Cuba on December 30 for a four-day visit, before going on to Venezuela to see President Chavez. His whirlwind tour then continues to France, Spain, Brussels (to meet with EU leaders), South Africa, China, and Brazil.

Morales, long a darling of the international left, is most frequently described by sympathetic journalists as a heroic champion of Bolivia's "indigenous peoples" and small coca farmers. However, there's much more to the picture. Since at least the mid 1990s, Morales has been a member of the Sao Paulo Forum, the notorious international terrorist conference whose most celebrated leaders include Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Brazil's President Lula da Silva.

At a 1995 conference in Buenos Aires, Morales declared: "If we want to be free, in Latin America there should not be one Cuba, but several Cubas.... What do we need for that? Heroic figures. And for me, Fidel Castro is such a figure. I am ready to proclaim him commander of the liberation forces of America, or Latin America."

Morales has not lost that Castroite vision. As if Bolivia does not have enough problems to occupy his attention, Morales appears to see himself as the new Che Guevara who will take Marxist "liberation" to the entire hemisphere. Speaking to his cheering supporters after his election victory, he declared: "Now what is left is to struggle for the unification of Latin America." Little wonder that Fidel dispatched a jet to fly Morales to Havana as the kickoff event of his recent global victory tour.

One of the main planks in Morales' party, Movement Toward Socialism, calls for nationalizing oil and gas resources. That has many energy users and investors worried.