Challenge: 1st world Latin America

  • Thread starter Deleted member 67076
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Deleted member 67076

Your challenge, is with a POD of 1500, to have the nations in Latin America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean to have a level of development and industrialization comparable to Europe, The US, Australia or Canada.

They must also be predominantly Spanish or Portuguese speaking, or at least use those languages as the language of administration.
 
They came pretty close in OTL.

Argentina and Chile are very close, Brazil is rising, Paraguay has been on the "rise" since Stroessner left and Uruguay has been stable and growing, abit slowly.

The problem remains to be Central America and the northern South America. To do this :

1 - Have the UPCA survive.
2 - Have Gran Colombia Survive
3 - Keep the Peru-Bolivar Confederation Alive.
4 - Avoid the Wars of the Confederation, War of the Triple Alliance, and numerous other petty disputes which would probably have been butterflied away anyway due to the first three. All of the major South American / Latin American wars were tragically easy to avoid or the result of internal instability which drew in outside forces .

If you can have those 4 things, I think you are off to a great start.
 
They came pretty close in OTL.

Argentina and Chile are very close, Brazil is rising, Paraguay has been on the "rise" since Stroessner left and Uruguay has been stable and growing, abit slowly.

The problem remains to be Central America and the northern South America. To do this :

1 - Have the UPCA survive.
2 - Have Gran Colombia Survive
3 - Keep the Peru-Bolivar Confederation Alive.
4 - Avoid the Wars of the Confederation, War of the Triple Alliance, and numerous other petty disputes which would probably have been butterflied away anyway due to the first three. All of the major South American / Latin American wars were tragically easy to avoid or the result of internal instability which drew in outside forces .

If you can have those 4 things, I think you are off to a great start.

5. Have the Brazilian monarchy survive. Brazil was already regarded as a rising power, until the monarchy ended: the fall of the monarchy was followed by instability, military dictatorships etc. No-one really supported the anti-royalist coup, but Emperor Pedro II was too depressed to be motivated to stop it.
 
All of them or just some of them? Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica are already pretty close.
 
Pretty close is an exaggeration. They are actually not close at all, only relatively when you compare them with the likes of Bolivia. Look a the OECD numbers.
 
Didn't Argentina (and maybe Chile) have higher standards of living with a larger middle class than Canada, Australia and NZ before the 1930s?
 
The tropics just arent going to be as wealthy, due to tropical diseases. Now that Malaria and Yellow Fever are controllable, Brazil has much better prospects. But before, say wwii, youre not going to get fully tropical countries that rich.

Now, as has been pointed out, Argentina used to be richer than Canada. I imagine she could stay that way, under the right circumstances. At minimum you need to avoid political instability and dictatorships.
 
If you avoid all the dictatorships and various weak governments than you could pretty easily avoid it. OTL the nations where just to politically unstable to modernize fast enough.
 

NothingNow

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Didn't Argentina (and maybe Chile) have higher standards of living with a larger middle class than Canada, Australia and NZ before the 1930s?

Pretty much. They weren't entirely industrialized back then.
Meanwhile, Chile and Argentina really only lost ground in the second half of the 20th century, for a number of reasons, many of which were in part the fault of various US interests and administrations.

A weaker US (or rather, the USN doesn't recover from it's 1880 nadir,) and better/luckier economic management could see Argentina and Chile emerging as two of the major economic powerhouses in the Americas.

Better Agricultural policies in Chile, and both nations fetishising Domestic arms development and production, along with infrastructure projects, and you've got most of the impetus for a fully developed economy, just in the knowledge and skill bases that requires.
It'd also pull Resource-rich Bolivia up a lot as well.
 
I think the key is encomienda. Not only is encomienda a kind of quasi-slavery that extracts labor from subject peoples without appropriate reward, the limited terms of the grants prevented the emergence of a long term and secure scheme of land ownership whereby property owners had the incentive to make improvements to estates that they could then sell or devise. It is both in one sense oo exploitive (with respect to people), and in another, not exploitive enough (with respect to land and physical resources).

Of course because it created an incentive for the encomenderos to Christianize the natives, (encomenderos get the natives' labor, but they must oversee the natives' religious observance in return) the encomienda system is one reason for the distinctive strength of Catholicism within Latin America. So quite likely if you get read of the encomienda you affect Latin American religious life. At the same time, because of the peculiar nature of the encomienda system, quite likely if you get rid of it, that would create an opportunity for system of starker inequality as other systems of labor "management" (like chattel slavery) take its place.
 

Deleted member 67076

The tropics just aren't going to be as wealthy, due to tropical diseases. Now that Malaria and Yellow Fever are controllable, Brazil has much better prospects. But before, say wwii, youre not going to get fully tropical countries that rich.
Wait I don't understand. The entire southern US was plagued with Malaria, yet it developed rather fine. Why can't tropical countries do similarly?

Also, is there no way to get the diseases controllable earlier on?
 
Wait I don't understand. The entire southern US was plagued with Malaria, yet it developed rather fine. Why can't tropical countries do similarly?

Also, is there no way to get the diseases controllable earlier on?

It did? What percentage of army recruits were turned away in wwii in the us due to horrible physical condition due to parasites, disease and malnutrition? A number that was totally scary for the Army Brass is a partial answer.

Not very much earlier. Epidemiology is pretty new, for one. Malaria was treatable by quinine - but theres a limited supply of natural chinchona bark, and if more than the upper class takes it, the disease develops resistance.

Mass drainage works and intensive inspections for tin cans/tires/whatever that provide breeding pools is possible - but requires an organized, energetic and competant government.
 

Deleted member 67076

It did? What percentage of army recruits were turned away in wwii in the us due to horrible physical condition due to parasites, disease and malnutrition? A number that was totally scary for the Army Brass is a partial answer.

Not very much earlier. Epidemiology is pretty new, for one. Malaria was treatable by quinine - but theres a limited supply of natural chinchona bark, and if more than the upper class takes it, the disease develops resistance.

Mass drainage works and intensive inspections for tin cans/tires/whatever that provide breeding pools is possible - but requires an organized, energetic and competant government.

400 years of development is a very long time.

Dammit.

So how would you get that competent, organized government?
 
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