República de Pará / Republiek Para / Republic of Para (TERverse)
The Republic of Pará is one of the many States in which the old Portuguese colony in Brazil, Vespucia (1), would be balkanized as a result of the Luso-Brazilian Rupture originated by the Iberian Union. They currently control the northern region of Brazil and maintain a tense relationship with the Alianza Republicana Vespuciana, mainly because the leaders and members of La Alianza consider Pará a "colonial nation" hardly different from the Viceroyalties. Likewise, the Vepucian states hate the system of apartheid or racial segregation implemented by the Paranians. From its capital in New Utopia (OTL Belem), the destinies of more than 50 million citizens are ruled with an iron fist by the leaders of the Republic.
As part of Brazil, the Pará region would be colonized by the Kingdom of Portugal between 1490 and 1560, mainly by immigrants from the Galicia region in search of new lands. In addition to the many Galicians (2), many immigrants from England and the Netherlands would also arrive, the latter fleeing Austrian tyranny and, after the Wars of Religion, mostly Catholics fleeing Calvinist (3) oppression. Along with the immigrants, African slaves would arrive, mainly from the Gold Coast and the Portuguese possessions in West and East Africa. This would have a very strong influence on the subsequent destiny of the country.
With the Rupture, the colony of Brazil would unilaterally declare its total and full independence from Spain under the name of "Vespucian Kingdom of Portugal", fleeing the remains of the royalist administration to Rio and settling there.
Pará would also participate in war efforts to preserve its territory from Spanish attempts to recover the territory, which is considered to have weakened the region enough to lead to Dutch Colonization, which lasted between 1620 and 1654. Historians now consider that the Dutch population of Pará welcomed their fiercely Calvinist cousins simply because they believed they could protect them from the Spanish.
This would provoke the first Pará Civil War, in which the Catholic Portuguese and the Calvinist Dutch would fight hard for control of Pará, as the Calvinists tried to “catechize” the local population through the use of brute force and torture. Ironically, this Dutch intervention would cause the United Kingdom of Spain to definitively abandon its attempts to reconquer the region in favor of supporting and arming the local Catholics; if one had to resign himself to the fact that the region was not under Spanish control, it was preferable that it at least not be a Calvinist country.
Without forgetting that the prevailing opinion in Toledo was that, in reality, Pará was not as important as the other regions that were under firm Iberian control.
Finally, after much effort and a particularly bloody war, in 1655 the Dutch would be expelled and Pará would be reunited with the rest of Brazil, but this union would be extremely unstable. Many of the Dutch had stayed in the region shifting the demographic balance firmly in favor of ethnic English and Dutch Calvinists to the detriment of Portuguese and Irish Catholics, united only in the common belief that downtrodden africans and Indians should be kept as slave labor.
As a result, between 1656 and 1770, the region would be the scene of black uprisings that were repressed with the greatest brutality, mainly because Africans had exploited the Pará Civil War to free themselves and fight against their slavers (in the most cynical way, both Spain as Holland and its patrons had declared the freedom of the slaves of the enemy if they fought on their side, even if at the same time they kept slaves in their own zone of control).
Historians continue to debate whether the origin of the Spanish abolitionist movement lies in the cruelties seen and documented in the Pará War, since it has been documented that, at the very least, there were abolitionist figures (mainly ecclesiastics and nobles) since the time of the Aztec Conquest. Just as the various Laws of Burgos sought to regulate slavery very strictly and minimize it as much as possible, opting instead for various forms of servitude.
What is certain is the fact that the veterans of Pará who would return to the various corners of the Empire, where they came from, would dedicate themselves to spreading the word that slavery was a horrendous evil and an attack against human dignity.
As military historians would say about this phenomenon “
it is very difficult to continue to believe that the person who fights, bleeds, suffers and dies by your side, and who has probably helped you to stay alive, is intrinsically inferior to you only because of his skin color , or because he prays to a different god. And once you see your fellow soldier as an equal, it's impossible not to see his civilian relatives the same way."
The American Revolution, and its eventual failure, would intensely shake the entire continent of Vespucia and the Pará region would be no less. Among the places to which the remains of the Continental Army of the United States of America moved was Pará, where they would settle to hide from the Spanish, French, Iroquois, Quinnational, and English forces that sought to destroy them.
At the time these forces arrived, the Pará region was the scene of a black revolt that would later become known as Cabanagem, and which was overtaking the weakened Pará forces; a popular point of divergence in this world's history is that the Cabanagem had managed to win and establish a second nation of African descent on Vespucia.
Unfortunately for the Cabanagem, the American forces were fiercely supportive of slavery, as well as strongly resentful of having to fight "their blacks" in Norvespucia. So, even though they should have been allies in theory (the Cabanagems believed in republican ideals and democracy), the Americans would support the efforts of the Pará authorities to put down the uprising. For the second time in history, United States flags and troops in Continental Army uniforms fought on Vespucia, this time to win.
By 1801 the black uprising had been completely quelled, but at the cost of trapping American troops in Pará. The Wars of Independence from Spain had broken out, fueled by remnants of US forces fleeing across the continent, turning the Caribbean and Central Atlantic into a combat zone. Recognizing discretion as the better part of courage, the Yankees of Pará chose to hide in the shadows, mingling with the local white population, only to rise up again at a more appropriate time and when they had more strength.
Much to the annoyance of the Americans, the local population would start calling them "Confederates" due to their Constitution being literally called as "Articles of Confederation". Historians are currently debating why there was a situation where the country was called the "United States of America" but the Constitution was called the "Articles of Confederation." The most common theory is that what happened was that the Continental Congress found the proposed name "Confederate States of America" too ugly, opting instead for "United States of America" as a compromise between supporters and detractors of the first name.
In 1822, after years of conspiracy and secret accumulation of weapons acquired by foreign partisans, as well as neighboring independent states, the Republic of Pará declared its full and unilateral independence, under the name "United States of New Holland". (The separatist authorities had decided to exploit the Dutch era as a differentiating element to encourage the population to support the separation).
This would immediately provoke the North-South War (1822 – 1827), in which the remnants of the Brazilian State would try to subjugate Pará again, without success due to the very formidable geographical obstacles that separated the North from the country from the South. After a series of skirmishes at sea, in which the naval forces of the United States of New Holland and the Brazilian State would shell each other, the war would end with the definitive collapse of the Brazilian State in 1828, mainly due to the grandiose accumulation of problems he faced.
Without anyone to make peace with or acknowledge its existence, the United States of New Netherland would languish in ignorance and poverty; the arrival of a new wave of refugees from the Second American Revolution, also slavers from the Mississippi area, would infuse new strength and vitality into the Republic.
In 1834 the name would be officially changed to "República de Pará", after it became clear that no one felt the slightest connection with New Holland, and it was considered that it was meaningless to continue using the name "United States" for what was a centralized unitary republic. Consequently, the country's capital, the old city of Santa María de Belem, would be renamed Nueva Utopia, in memory of the federal capital project that had never been built in Norvespucia.
Slavery would be abolished in 1880, which makes the Republic of Pará the Vespucian State that would take the longest to abolish slavery. Of course, this would provoke the War of Three, in which new Cabanagem revolutionaries, slave planters who wanted to preserve slavery, and the Continental Army of Pará, under the command of a government of powerful industrialists who wanted to force the abolition of slavery, faced each other. slavery for considering that the "pretos" (4) were better exploitable and much cheaper as salaried workers than as slaves.
During the Great Global War, the Republic of Pará would openly sympathize with the Anglo-German Entente and its attempts to break the Union of Arms to impose the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon Powers (5). As a consequence, they would offer their ports and bases as supply points for Entente forces, even though they officially declared themselves neutral. The Union would reply to this by imposing a blockade on the coast of Pará, causing a brutal economic crisis in the country that would make the Entente military move to a more welcoming place. Likewise, the civil government would fall due to the pressure exerted by the economy on the verge of implosion and the agitation among the “preto” citizens.
Pará is currently governed by a military junta, which exercises the civil government through the National Security Council and the Integral Union Party, which is the one that represents the interests of the rich white and Calvinist industrialists, as well as the one that monopolizes all the seats. congressional. Officially it is a presidential and democratic republic. In practice, Pará functions as a Swedish-style military-financial oligarchy, in which candidates who are not liked by the National Security Council tend to have strange accidents in which bullets hit their heads.
The organized opposition is based mainly on political activism (through the illegal Cabanagem National Tribal Council) and terrorism (Cabanagem Liberation Front, supported mainly by the Republic of Venezuela and the Argentine Confederation), which has motivated the Bureau of State Security (SecStatBur) is one of the most developed in Sudvespucia.
The society is strictly segregated by very strict laws, which impose draconian punishments such as prison sentences of at least 30 years and even death sentences depending on the seriousness of the "crime against racial purity". (The Republic of Pará only stopped imposing corporal punishment, such as mutilation and castration, in the 1940s and that solely due to diplomatic pressure and as part of the attempt to disassociate itself from the recently crushed Anglo-Saxon Powers.)
It can be affirmed without fear of being mistaken that more Paranos of African descent reside outside of Pará than within this nation; security forces are said to shoot at those who try to flee to neighboring French Guiana. Pará remains mainly due to the export of raw materials and the cheap labor it offers (based on the systematic exploitation of the "pretos"). These efforts have been hampered as more and more nations have joined trade embargoes against Pará, out of disgust for its racist policies, and seeking an end to them. Pará's main trade is with its like-minded allies, such as the Commonwealth of England, the Dominion of Avalon, the Republic of New Zealand (6), the Dutch Empire, and some Vespuccian States.
It is known for certain that the SecStat of Pará and the SBS (Special Branch of Security, Special Branch of Security) of the Commonwealth of England maintain very good relations, as well as that they work together to screw their counterparts in the Union of Arms. It is suspected that this collaboration also seeks to get the Republic of Pará to obtain its own fission bomb program. Which is a flagrant violation of the Nagasaki Treaty for the Limitation of the Proliferation of Atomic Weapons.
Therefore, a policy of strong sanctions against Pará has been adopted and heavier military measures against this regime are being studied...
(1) TTL name of America
(2) From Galicia, a region in the Northwest of Iberian Peninsula
(3) TTL "Calvinist" is the general term for "Protestant".
(4) Local term for "inhabitants of Vespucia from African descendance". Derivated from portuguese language.
(5) Local generic term to meaning "British Empire", usually used as slang to mean "the alliance of English-speaking countries who wants to assume power as World Overlord."
(6) TTL New Zealand is the name of the OTL New England region, because was colonizated by the Dutch.
