Because not making maps was boring.
I haven't seen a map dedicated solely to South America in
ages. What's more, whenever a map does feature South America, its usually some kind of appendage of a North America map. Oh, and entirely contingent, easily butterfly-able borders are always maintained, even if the POD is decades, maybe even centuries before those borders were first defined IOTL. Not to mention the fact that the continent usually suffers from some lazy combination of space-filling-empires, with small nations seemingly existing just to be annexed by their larger brethren (a trope I particularly dislike). Its just lazy, and I find it
really annoying how common this is. (To be honest, this is a wider problem that Africa, and to a lesser extent Asia also suffer from, that I want to try and rectify. Guess what I'll be mapping next).
This would have been tacked on to the earlier North America map, though time constraints prevented that. Which is fortunate in a way, because it allowed me to make a dedicated South America map to try and offset the worrying trends mentioned above (and even introduce a few new nations in as plausible a way as possible). So yeah, in a way it worked.
OK, rant aside.
As with the last map, things go pretty convergent to OTL 'till the 30's, with the main change being that Brazil dodges the Vargas bullet, and instead gets hit by the veritable tank-shell that is the Integralists when the Great Depression hits. With Brazil under a potty fascist junta, the semi-democracies of the Southern Cone take a sharp veer to the left in response (regional rivalries are a wonderful thing). Hilarity ensues.
Bolivia smashes Paraguay in a different Chaco war, then falls to communism when disillusioned veterans hankering for reform turn on a government they feel has abandoned them. Cue paranoid Brazilian invasion, illicit support for the break-away departments in Bolivia's lowland east, the Brazilian puppetisation of Paraguay, and a very tense stand-off at the Uruguayan border that very nearly sparks a wider, continent-spanning war.
In the fallout from all this, newly communist Bolivia allies itself to the new left-wing Southern Cone Pact (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), while Brazil props up equally nutty dictatorships in Paraguay, Santa Cruz and El Beni as buffers against the socialist or communist powers to the south and east. They also move into French Guiana during the messy transition from 3rd Republic to 4th Republic. Thus develops a rather farcical parallel Frozen War (The SCP didn't like the Soviet Union's now proven authoritarianism, so took a line of ITTL American style neutrality in the wider Frozen War, while isolated Brazil was a block all by its self), that divides the continent, sees tensions run high, and leads to both Brazil and Argentina developing nukes.
The Brazilian regime finally comes down in the 70's (Instead of being discredited by one truly atrocious regime in the 40's (Nazi Germany was fortunately butterflied ITTL), fascism clings on as a nutty fringe ideology, and is discredited by a string of a dozen or so rather nasty (and often depressingly long lasting) regimes instead), and is replaced by an equally repressive but less ideologically abhorrent military regime. That regime in turn clings on 'till the 90's when it finally succumbs to collapse and is replaced by the (mostly)democratic 4th Brazilian Republic, shedding a few peripheral regions in the process.
Today, the continent remains divided, though along different lines and with fortunately much lower stakes that before.
The SCP is still around, and by now is morphing into an OTL EU style pan-national trade block/economic union thingy, and has successfully incorporated a few of the southern Brazilian break-away states. Still communist Bolivia is an old ally that's beginning to embarrass the rest of the SCP with its old fashioned views on how communism should work (think OTL Cuba, and you'll get a good picture of Bolivian politics). These days the SCP mostly treats it like the proverbial mad old relative in the corner; still accepted in a vague sense as a member of the club, but excluded from any situations where they might say or do something stupid.
Brazil is about as left-wing as the SCP nowdays, though continual mistrust prevents the two blocks from cooperating. Brazil is trying to mimic TTL's America, with autonomous Native American lands and even its own SAR equivalent in the Xingu National Republic, though this isn't quite working out as initially hoped. As a result, the Brazilian sphere of former puppets and a few break-away states is rather isolated diplomatically (and not doing too well because of that).
As for the rest, Peru leads a rather loose conservative block on the west coast, that consistently leans east to the expanding economies of Asia, Venezuela is a military junta that looks likely to collapse any day now, and Colombia is under the rule of a group of left wing populists that would be very easy to confuse with OTL Bolivarians. Two of the Guyana's have both been integrated (in differing ways) directly into their former colonial masters.
The current international pariah is Democratic Cayenne, the last remnant of Integralist Brazil's former sphere of influence, and the last openly fascist state on Earth. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, the primitive rocket launches from TTL's Kourou launch site are
definitely not peaceful.
On a final note, it was shocking just how many basic geography fixes I had to do to bring the base map up to scratch. Seriously, Lake Guri
The 10th largest man-made lake in the world by area, 6th largest by volume, isn't even shown on the best base map I could find. Urgh. That was just one of a large raft of fixes I had to make from scratch; everything from adding loads of lakes and ice sheets, to drawing on a rough approximation of Brazil's OTL Native American reservations. That ate up an unreasonable amount of the time it took to make this.
Anyway, enough complaining, the map;
Apologies again for the typos in the notes; I'm rather tired right now, and I rushed it a little.
I feel there is a lacking amount of ASOIAF maps 