We don't seem to get a lot of Central American WIs. So, here's a try at one for Guatemala.
Back in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Guatemala had a string of rather unpleasant right-wing governments. They did the sorts of things right-wing Central Amercan governments did back then... kill Communists and union organizers and liberals and Indians and priests who were liberals or worked with Indians, hand out juicy franchises to foreign mines and plantations, organize death squads, yadda yadda.
These governments were opposed by a revolutionary group with the unhappy name of URNG. URNG was an umbrella organization over several anti-government groups, some Communist, some not.
Now, when URNG formed, one of these groups (I misremember which, but I think it was the artist-writers-students one) suggested that URNG should reach out to the Indians. After all, they were roughly half of the country's
population! And they tended to be strongly (if passively) anti-government.
The motion was rejected. There seem to have been a couple of reasons. One, most of the URNG groups were leftists, and partook of the standard Central American leftist anti-clericalism. Since most of the Indians were devout, if not exactly orthodox, reaching out to the Indians would have meant coming to an accomodation with the Church. (1) And that wasn't too popular.
Two, with the exception of the peasant group, most of the URNG groups were members of the fair-skinned elite. Despite their numbers, the Indians had always been politically meaningless as far as this group was concerned. That was true even under the relatively liberal Arevalo and Arbenz, way back in the 1940s, and it was still true. So they just didn't see the point.
The result of this was that the Indians got caught in the middle, despised and murdered by both sides. (Much more by the government's death squads, to be sure.) (2) Despite occasional flourishes of rhetoric, by and large URNG never treated the Indians as much more than beasts of burden and rather stupid neutrals. The Indians, in turn, never viewed URNG with anything more than very limited enthusiasm, as the lesser of two evils rather than a positive good. (I'm simplifying a complex reality, but that's basically what it boiled down to.)
The result of all this was that the Indians got the worst of both worlds, brutally punished for a revolution that they had little part in. Meanwhile URNG, cut off from Mao's "sea of the people", was never quite able to topple the government, though they did give it conniption fits for a while.
So, the WI: URNG reaches out to the Indians, and seeks to transform itself into a broad-based indigenous revolutionary movement. This is a stretch, but not I think impossible.
Further, then: that this gives URNG enough extra strength to overthrow the government. Given the initial premise, I think this one's not too hard. Guatemala's governments during this period were not exactly run by the best and brightest. OTL, despite all the killing, the government never did whip URNG; the best they could do was achieve a peace of mutual exhaustion and a UN-backed settlement in the 1990s.
There's even a window of opportunity. The Carter administration cut off all aid to Guatemala in 1977, citing gross human rights abuses. The Reagan administration started it up again in 1981 (because, you know, Commies). But there were a few years when the military government was on its own.
(Of course, URNG wasn't formally founded until 1982. But the various groups had been moving towards cooperation for years before that, and there was a proto-URNG as early as the '60s. So I guess the POD is an *URNG that forms a few years earlier /and/ includes the Indians.)
So. Suppose we have an *URNG victory in, ohhh, 1981 -- before renewed US aid can really begin to take effect. It doesn't take much to overthrow a Guatemalan government. (3) And goodness knows Lucas Garcia wasn't popular. He was hated by the left, by the far right, and by the people generally. It's possible the military wouldn't even fight for him. They overthrew him OTL, replacing him with Montt.
So now we have not one, but two left-wing governments in 1980s Central America. Guatemala's won't be as Communist as Nicaragua's -- it'll be a left-to-far-left coalition, with the Communists just one group of several -- but it's questionable whether the Reagan administration will make this distinction. (4) Should produce an interesting ramping up of the paranoid rhetoric; Guatemala is only /fourteen/ hours by car from Texas!
The *URNG is going to be explicitly pro-Indian, which is something like a first in the region. That alone should produce interesting knock-ons. Then there are the effects on Mexico.
Of course, like Nicaragua, *URNG Guatemala comes with an instant counterrevolutionary guerrilla movement. Which is going to be a lot more widespread and popular than Nicaragua's Contras. Rios Montt was the least unpopular of Guatemala's right-wing leaders; if he survives, he'll immediately become the Prince Across The Water. And the Ladino-Indian split ran painfully deep, so an "Indian" government would be widely and immediately unpopular among quite a lot of the population.
This one could go a number of ways, some of them interesting, some of them... really unpleasant.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
(1) One of several peculiarities of the Guatemalan conflict is that the Church, instead of being associated with reaction and authority, was seen as something like a neutral third party.
(2) The government did either 80% or 93% of the killings, depending on whether you believe the Church's study or the UN's.
(3) Five coups in the last 50 years, and that's not counting 1954.
(4) Though perhaps not impossible. Believe it or not, there were a couple of hot-pink Latin American and Caribbean governments in the 1980s that suffered nothing worse than the occasional diplomatic snub. Cheddi Jaggan, anyone?