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It will be one of the Cardenals. They are both impressive figures and, along with now-Cardinal Obando y Bravo, men I deeply admire. They have kept the flame of the Sandinista revolution alive while Daniel Ortega has been busy wiping his ass with its legacy. The Nicaraguan Church produced quite a...

I've always found that a good way of summing things up is that authoritarian regimes prohibit social activity in opposition to the state, while totalitarian regimes prohibit social activity not in support of the state.

Less a dumb move and more of a miscalculation. As for Rios Montt, he'll pop up in some strange ways. Yeah, things will go south. How far and fast are all up to his successors. To give a hint, one of his successors as President will be one of Nicaragua's most famous people today, a man of...

The Honduran military can purchase arms and hire mercenaries, but they're still pretty broke. Honduras is a poor country, the government is spending extravagantly on the military, public works and industrialization (and corruption), and they have to borrow most of that money. Without either debt...

Just going to bump this. Is anyone still reading/interested?

If the transition from PRI hegemony to democracy goes sharply south and resistance to the government turns violent, Mexico could become a 'failed state' pretty fast. I think that the United States would intervene militarily pretty quickly, if only to establish a buffer zone along its border.

Guatemala City, Guatemala 18 September 1979 Manuel Colom Argueta –economist, lawmaker and President of Guatemala– looked out over the city, murky in rain-drenched twilight. His suit, fine Italian wool, was soaked through, but he remained on the roof of the National Palace. Even through...

He's giving them a stake, with the assumption that between military defeat and state-building in the countryside, they won't get very far politically. Considering that the Sandinistas are in quite a different position as OTL (they aren't the main resistance group to a near-universally hated...

Thanks! I have butterflied away Carter. The primary could have been close. In this TL, Carter decided not to run (handwavium). Udall fought off a few insurgent candidates before cruising to victory. He picked Scoop Jackson as his VP to gain foreign policy cred and demonstrate that he isn't...

March of the Sandinistas and Honduras Somewhere near Murra, Nicaragua 12 December 1977 The border did not really exist out here, among the trees and underbrush. That may have made Omar Cabezas feel better about the direction that the remnants of the FSLN were taking. The...

Not exactly. Mejia is not entirely on-board with the coup itself. Instead, he's leveraging the threat of the coup to place himself on top of the National Guard, and in the good graces of the President himself. The deal will essentially amount to giving the National Guard carte-blanche in the...

“The constitution proposed by the Nicaraguan Constituent Commission was a progressive, democratic, and moderate document. Written with the aid of legal scholars from Europe, the United States and even Israel, Costa Rica and Japan, the 1976 Constitution carefully balanced individual rights with...

Well, he's still around, de-facto leading the moderate faction of the Sandinistas. He'll play an important role in the events to follow Thanks, something like that may come up in a future meeting, or perhaps later in that conversation. As for Plasmaferesis, it's either still around, or it...

Sure, they were, but however reliant on Chinese and Soviet aid they were in 1954, they were even more reliant on 'fraternal' support after the Vietnam War.

I think American intervention has had a great deal to do with the present state of authoritarianism in Vietnam. The incredibly bloody war there killed millions of Vietnamese and militarized both their state and society. Had Vietnam instead had those resources and people to 'expend' on economic...