Biography: A.M. Mora y Leon

A.M. Mora y Leon is the pseudonym of a U.S.-based journalist in Los Angeles. Educated at Columbia journalism school in New York, she has been in the business for more than ten years, working at different newspapers, newswires and magazines. She has been a United Nations correspondent, a Wall Street reporter and a foreign correspondent. She has lived in England and Singapore, and travelled through Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.

From a young age, she wanted to destroy communism and her first interest was Russia. However, as the Cold War ended, that interest developed into a different one - in the rise of the Far East, notably China and Vietnam, and the Asian Tiger states. Living in Singapore, she witnessed the great Asian crisis, traveling for two years to nearly every country in Southeast Asia to talk to people and write about it.

Returning to New York in 1998 as a financial journalist, she then watched the echoing economic trouble in Latin America and watched as it became political trouble - and began to visit the countries there. She has visited Mexico, Ecuador, Panama, Argentina and Venezuela ... so far.