Universal issues such as one's place and role in society are paramount in this personal history. What happened to the author during his year as an exchange student in South America forever changed him. He left the U.S. a boisterous, gregarious and precocious youth. He had an unshakeable belief in his own personal abilities and is obsessed with the idea of personal succe man capable of going to even the most remote corner of the world in the most difficult of circumstances and succeeding. But something goes terribly wrong and he does not know how to ask for help.

The year is 1981, General Alfredo Stroessner has been in absolute control of Paraguay since 1954. Eric moves in with the aristocratic family of a senior politico in the Stroessner government, Minister of Agriculture Hernando Allegheri. The young American finds himself in a paramilitary compound complete with armed guards, machine guns and extended family servants in a lush tropical garden.

At first the exotic surroundings and hun the Allegheris and their entourage. By the time of Hernando Jr.'s wedding Eric is prepared to stage a coup d'etat.... Friendly Dictators is an epic personal voyage from bourgeois safety into the exotic and a descent into the existential seas of nothingness. It is a tale of politics, personal and public, personal determination, and of recovery of the will to live.