AHC: Brazil acquires a Pacific Coast

raharris1973

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This challenge is pretty straightforward- get Brazil sovereign and continguous access to territory on the Pacific Ocean.
 
South America is simply more difficult to do this than is North America, which is probably why it wasn't done. The Rockies are not the Andes and the Mississsippi-Missouri basin is not the Amazon basin.

The best bet is to get Brazil a super-competent and expansionist and militarily oriented Emperor who gets into a war with Bolivia, instead of Paraguay AIOTL. The Brazilians conquer Bolivia and get Bolivia's Pacific seacoast, which wasn't much to write home about, but there you have done it. If you try this with Peru the Andes and Amazon really become problems.
 
Was the Brazilian Empire in any position to invade Gran Colombia when they were in their war of independence? I dunno if there would be enough to make it last given the cultural differences though.
 
Was the Brazilian Empire in any position to invade Gran Colombia when they were in their war of independence? I dunno if there would be enough to make it last given the cultural differences though.

I mean, there's no reason why they would or could. The Amazon at the time was a literal death trap, and if by virtue of a Brazillophile ASB they get a navy to traverse the Atlantic, they now have to take the Spanish-speaking part of the continent's at the time largest country, with Simon Bolivar, the most competent military man outside Europe at the time, and then hold down a population that was pretty large, that had just wrested power away from what they had seen as a legitimate king - they would by no means accept an illegitimate one. Plus, any transport to or from Gran Colombia, let alone its Pacific coast, would need to be managed by sea, which would mean it would be way harder and expensive to keep the zone.

This is, to a lesser extent, equally problematic for all areas of Andean America. There's q reason Brazil's expansionism only really went against Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay iOTL. The Acre and Amazon border growths were mostly forward-thinking Brazilian industrialists looking to profit from corrupt Bolivian and Colombian caudillos who didn't care about vast swathes of malaria-ridden jungle chock full with pumas, piranhas and natives until way after vulcanisation of rubber was discovered.
 
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