Ronald Runge

Gone on the Far East Wind: the Late Monroe Doctrine Ronald Runge

Latin America has always been fixed in the mind of the average American as a happy place, doing the tango or having a mardi gras, and not the place where one would expect the arising of a new-age, communist-like "internationale". That image is punctured by Latin America's huge nature-granted oil reserves. Latin oil creates a battleground of all the world's energy competitors. The image is also blurred by the hapless coca leaf, raised by Latin America's indigenous Indians, but used as a money source by a murderous band of communist, capitalist, cut-throats, called F. A. R. C., who operating out of the back jungles of Columbia fly the coca to Brazil's Rio de Janeiro, where, in murderous drug wars, it is magically transformed into a powder, which, when smuggled to America is sold for billions of dollars under its new name of cocaine. Cocaine and oil have forever changed Latin America from a happy place to a house of horrors. American ignorance, and ig-norance, of its own "Monroe Doctrine", which, for centuries, has kept Latin America independent, is disturbing to Ian Landen Stuhr, an American oil man from Houston, working in the Venezuelan oil fields. He sees arising from the Asian swamps, an evil Goliath, hungry for oil, and unwilling to play by the rules, and infecting Latin America with a fatal malady called the Red Chinese Disease. But Ian has discovered a latent stirring among America's middle class citizens, who are not willing to sit and watch, Latin America, along with the "Monroe Doctrine", go down the drain.