Excellent piece by a fan of this blog, The DiploMad, where he expounds on the urgency of what's happening -- actually, what's not happening -- to our south. Read "In Latin America, it's Ten Minutes to Midnight":

Our Latin American policy is in total disarray. The State Department's Western Hemisphere Affairs (WHA) bureau has disintegrated under the hapless leadership of Clinton and her Assistant Secretary. It is rife with incompetent political appointees and spineless, gray bureaucrats afraid of their own shadows, and tied up in concerns about political correctness, peripheral issues (e.g., climate change), not offending anybody, and trying to untangle the hopeless Haiti aid mess. One of these WHA political appointees, I will note, wanted the US to join with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia in condemning Arizona for its immigration laws -- no joke, that is true. The NSC is non-existent. A total vacuum has developed at the NSC on Latin America since the Obama people took over. They have no plan to stop the decay. Many of them deny the decay exists.