The following investigative analysis was derived from countless hours of ‘reverse engineering’ purposefully vague historical references hidden in the dark corners of Cold War historical materials.—Iassen

What if I told you that in the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan ordered the U.S. Army and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to lead and plan a full-scale military invasion against the smallest sovereign South American nation, Suriname? Hard to believe this was something most of us have never even heard about. And don’t be embarrassed, I also had to Google where the country was.

President Reagan was prepared to send good men to fight and die for their country over aluminum production. More specifically, bauxite—the ore that alumina is extracted from. The catalyst of this almost-conflict was a company known as ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America), a Manhattan-based global aluminum producer with a long and colorful history of hostile takeovers, third-world exploitation, illegal monopolization, and later, a company dissolution demanded by the U.S. Justice Department.

Alcoa