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The challenge: make Colombia a regional economic and/or political power by the year 2012 with a POD no later then 1900, bonus points for having the country at Argentina levels of development by 1950 and/or not diminishing Brazil's development.Total elimination of the drug trade is not necessary but NO NARCO STATES please.
I think the country has always had the potential (but I might be biased considering my Colombian heritage)to be a small power, its a country with plenty of natural resources, a good sized well-educated middle class and a unique location with access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that could potential grant it great strategic and economic power, but as we all know this has been stifled by the drug trade and long running civil war.
I think one major POD would be to somehow prevent the pointless and obscene butchery of La Violencia (seriously, the country saw sub-Saharan Africa levels of brutality (my grandfather ,a liberal had to flee to Venezuela)) by preventing the assasination of Gaitan in '48, but I feel like the classic South American Liberal v Conservative dynamic was to deeply implanted by then to completely avoid a clash.
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