When Lazaro Cardenas nationalised Mexico's oil industry, not only Latin America but poor nations everywhere rejoiced. A poor country successfully asserted its right to the hydrocarbon riches of its subsoil against oil companies from rich countries that saw access to such resources at nugatory cost as their right. But that was 1938.

The "nationalisation" of Bolivian gas this week by Evo Morales, president, has an element of history repeating itself as farce. Mr Morales, the former leader of his country's coca growers, inevitably described the takeover as "historic". The reality is less so.