Intelligence Analysis Applied to Real Life.
Institution of the Americas documents the tools, methods, field experiences, and decisions Rickynomics uses to help people navigate safety, business, property, finance, and humanitarian work.
Why This Work Matters
Most people do not lose money, time, or safety because the information was unavailable. They lose it because nobody validated what they already had, or because the wrong question got answered well.
Intelligence work is a discipline for closing that gap. Define the decision, separate fact from assumption, check the sources, find the mechanism underneath, then act and measure what changed. This site documents that discipline applied to ordinary problems.
What You Will Find Here
Field Notes
Short accounts of real situations and the decisions they required. What happened, what I checked, what changed the assessment, and what another person can use somewhere else.
The Resource Center
The tools, websites, public records systems, and gear I actually use. What each one is for, when it helps, what it does not do, and what it costs.
Proofs of Concept
Complete case walkthroughs from initial condition to measured outcome. The evidence, the mechanism, the action taken, and the lesson that transfers to a different setting.
Ricardo Alonzo
Meet the Founder
Ricardo Alonzo served as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst. He now applies the same method to problems that have nothing to do with the military. Define the decision. Establish what is actually known. Validate the evidence. Find the mechanism underneath. Act, then measure what changed.
The subject changes. The method does not. Real estate and mortgage lending showed him how public records, contracts, and financing structures punish the people who never read them. Running businesses showed him what a decision costs when nobody checked the information behind it.
Living and working in Colombia showed him how much of what people believe about a place comes from sources that have never been there. Humanitarian work alongside older adults in Antioquia showed him that good intentions do not survive contact with missing records, unverified needs, and money nobody is accounting for.
He writes and records from inside that work rather than from a distance. The situations are real, the tools are the ones he actually uses, and the outcomes get reported whether or not they went the way he expected.
Institution of the Americas exists to document that method in public, so the people reading it can use it somewhere else.
Get in Touch
Questions, Corrections, and Case Leads
Use the form below to ask a question, correct something published here, suggest a tool worth reviewing, or describe a situation that might make a useful case. Sending a message does not create a client relationship or guarantee a reply.
