Validea CEO John Reese says he’s finding a number of bargains in Latin America, an area where his Guru Strategies have had great success in the past.

“When it comes to major emerging-market economies, Latin America as a whole is certainly no longer the ‘banana republic,’ sorry-state region it once seemed to be,” Reese writes for Real Money. “Take Brazil, for example — the kingpin of this burgeoning economic geographic area. Its population now exceeds 200 million, and its economy ranks as the seventh-largest in the world. … If you want an internationally diversified portfolio of stocks — and almost everyone should — you need Latin American names.”

Since its inception in 2007, Reese’s Latin America portfolio has been the best performer of several geographic-based portfolios he monitors on the Validea Pro portion of his website. It has risen 58.8% vs. a 4.7% loss for the benchmark index, MSCI EAFE (Morgan Stanley Capital International Europe, Australasia, Far East). The portfolio is already up more than 15% this year.

Reese offers five Latin American stocks his strategies, each of which is based on the approach of a different investing great, are high on right now. Among them: Telecom Argentina, which gets high marks from his Kenneth Fisher-based model.