Red Dawn averted!The concept for a TL is in my ideas list where the US fights a war to 'liberate' Mexico (plus most of Central America too) from Communist control. A heck of an idea, a lot of research.
One day...
Red Dawn averted!The concept for a TL is in my ideas list where the US fights a war to 'liberate' Mexico (plus most of Central America too) from Communist control. A heck of an idea, a lot of research.
One day...
Mexico was always the "big domino" in communist dreams. But the reality of the Mexican economy is that there have always been too many successful small businesses and anti-communist Catholics (despite Mexico's significant anti-clerical history) to allow a political settlement with real Bolshevik style politics. They had too much trade with the US since the Porfirato era to allow a revolutionary consensus to be openly hostile to the US. You could have true revolutionaries in the Hot Lands like Zapata (but even he was no communist; just a socialist), but in the Norte, you had cowboy revolutionaries like Villa who wanted to reform the system democratically and only took up arms to resist oppression. They would've never tolerated the European-style repression that it took to maintain the Russian or Chinese regimes. Too much of a love for freedom was in the air.
A more successful Communist insurgency and agitation is plausible, and scary, but a final Red victory is not.
But that's the rub, he's arguing that the Mexican people, by and large, really didn't want full-on communism.Well, it is. Every place going communist is. If the people want, they can get everything done. And if its possible to convince people of shit like fascism or monarchism, it is surely possible to convince them of the liberation of the working class.
Mexico was always the "big domino" in communist dreams. But the reality of the Mexican economy is that there have always been too many successful small businesses and anti-communist Catholics (despite Mexico's significant anti-clerical history) to allow a political settlement with real Bolshevik style politics. They had too much trade with the US since the Porfirato era to allow a revolutionary consensus to be openly hostile to the US. You could have true revolutionaries in the Hot Lands like Zapata (but even he was no communist; just a socialist), but in the Norte, you had cowboy revolutionaries like Villa who wanted to reform the system democratically and only took up arms to resist oppression. They would've never tolerated the European-style repression that it took to maintain the Russian or Chinese regimes. Too much of a love for freedom was in the air.
A more successful Communist insurgency and agitation is plausible, and scary, but a final Red victory is not.
But that's the rub, he's arguing that the Mexican people, by and large, really didn't want full-on communism.
But Trotsky can't be leader of mexicoThere's always been the idea of Leon Trotsky leading his own revolution in Mexico after he went into exile and making it his own communist nation to counter Stalin's regime. This would easily cause problems for the Comintern and especially for the communist bloc in the cold war if both countries survive until then. Maybe imagine Trotskyist Mexican Relations with the USSR similar to Stalin's relations with Titoist Yugoslavia.
Also, we probably would've built a "wall" much earlier than in our timeline. like, maybe during the Reagan era.