Evo Morales…the Bolivian President…spent the First of May weekend with Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela figuring out their strategy for a Free Trade Zone in Latin America. No doubt high on their agenda was not how to do it…which is not hard…but how to deal with the response of overdeveloped countries like the USA. A couple of days later on his return to La Paz Morales sent Government troops to secure the country’s foreign-owned gas fields.

To some extent this was grandstanding for the Bolivian public. The Bolivian President has always been conscious of the fact that previous Bolivian leaders had made promises to the indigenous population only to renege on them when in office. But if this was Gesture Politics it was the right gesture…and was not only gesturing.

Before being elected Morales had said: ‘We will renegotiate all contracts…they are illegal since Congress has never ratified them. The State will recover the property of its national resources. But we are open to foreign investment in exchange for a share of the business.’ The point of yesterday’s action was to let foreign multinationals know that Morales is serious. Foreign companies have been given 180 days to strike new deals with the Bolivian State Energy Company ( YPFB ). What Morales wants is for all gas and oil sales to be handled by YPFB which will take a cut at source leaving the foreign operators like BP and BG to act as operators of the fields.

But when you read the small print yesterday’s actions look more like the opening move in an anticipated long drawn-out haggling session…familiar to anyone who has bargained with a stall holder in an Arabian Souk…than the radical nationalisation implied by the World’s Press. Buried within Morales’ talk of imposing 82 percent taxes was the qualification that this would only apply to gas fields that last year extracted more than 100 million cubic feet of gas. This applies to only two concessions so this muscle flexing is really a shot across the bows.

Morales has already successfully regained control of water resources for the Bolivian people from the mighty Bechtel Corporation. So it makes sound political sense to take on the multinational energy giants next as they have a tradition of negotiating the sort of agreements that Morales has in mind. But the squeeze is unlikely to stop here. Next on the President’s list will be the mining and lumber companies. American Liberals should wish Morales well and do what they can to stop their governments from Allende-style interventions. It is not true that what is good for General Motors shareholders is good for the American people. America’s long-term interests are better served by a self-sufficient Cuban-style Latin America with a well-educated middle class at ease with itself and with the outside world.

This scramble for global resources is not restricted to Putin’s Russia and Morales’ Bolivia. These…and the War in Iraq…are merely the situations in the glare of day-to-day newspaper headlines. Something is afoot in Greenland for instance. A few weeks ago the European Union signed a treaty with Denmark which appears to give Greenland £30 million a year in exchange for control over policies like scientific research. Let’s hope that the Danes know what they are doing. There are rumours of massive oil deposits under Greenland’s ice…and that means 90% of Greenland…prospecting licences have tripled in the past three years and untold mineral riches supposedly lie under the melting Arctic ice waiting to be mined by multinational companies.