This is Dania Suárez, from Cartagena, Colombia and if you’ve been reading the Daily News or some other tabloid lately you’ve seen her picture several times by now. She is the sex worker at the center of the Secret Service prostitution scandal, which has since branched out into the El Salvador prostitution scandal and the Brazil prostitution scandal. Now we know why Sofia Vergara is so brash yet principled on American Family. She was escaping zany Latin America, where women are hookers and they’re not going to let you get away without paying.

This is predictable of course, since hot women have been a hallmark of the way Latinos are perceived in the Bland North. But what about the event, that Summit of the Americas that Obama would be attending, which was the reason the Secret Service had come down early in the first place? What about the chance to engage in a dialog about the failure of the War on Drugs, or Free Trade policies that are not exactly universally acclaimed in Latin America, or the endless imposition of the embargo on Cuba, or the generally dismal nature of U.S. policy toward Latin America that resulted, in part, with a coup that ousted the president of Honduras with the tacit support of Secretary of State Clinton?

I’ve been meaning to do a post about this, but Amy Goodman smartly elaborated on this idea last week, here is her column in English and Spanish.