Zélia Alalouf, Brazil in Transition, 1920-70 (São Paulo: Nova Fronteira, 2013)
… The Rome Concordat of 1952 put an end to the longest exile of the Church since the Avignon papacy. It was an agreement made possible by the passage of two generations since the Great War: where once a reactionary Pope and a harshly anticlerical Italian government had done battle over Rome, a politically moderate Curia and a Catholic Liberal-led coalition in Italy were now able to share. It was made possible, as well, by changing conceptions of sovereignty; in 1897, it would have been impossible to imagine the Pope being sovereign over the Vatican buildings while Italy retained title to the land below them, or of the Curia holding them as trustees in the name of God and humanity.
The ceremonial leave-taking from Rio de Janeiro took place on January 1, 1953, with an estimated four million people from throughout Latin America crowding the streets that lay on the Pope’s way to the airport. There, for the first time in history, he conferred a papal declaration on an entire nation: Brazil was given the title Shelter of the Church, and its citizens would have the right in perpetuity to call themselves Shelterers. The Jewish and Muslim Brazilians and the followers of folk religions were not excepted – in a statement remarkable for the time, the Pope addressed them as brothers and expressed his gratitude for their part in making the Curia welcome – but it was taken to heart most strongly by the Catholics, who knew that Brazil, and all Latin America, would retain a special place in the Church’s heart even after its return to Rome.
And it could hardly be otherwise, because the Church had been profoundly influenced by its half-century of exile. It had been exposed to Latin America’s extremes of wealth and poverty, had taken the side of its peasants and urban poor against the feudal aristocracy, and, in the crucible of the Venezuelan wars, had discovered its opposition to nationalism and refined its conception of international law. The street-fighting Church of Pope Celestine and his successors was one that had fundamentally adopted the world-view of the Latin American poor, and it would bring that viewpoint home to Europe.
In the meantime, Catholic populism and social teaching had affected the politics of Latin America more than nearly anyplace else, and had matured along the way. Brazil was a fitting example: where it had been a reactionary semi-theocracy before 1909, and a dominantly conservative one in the last twelve years of Empress Isabel’s reign [1], Catholic parties now coexisted with secular ones all along the political spectrum. The Church’s doctrinal conservatism had come fully to terms with democracy and had grown to accommodate a variety of political approaches: by the 1940s, European-style Catholic Liberals, Mexican-influenced Catholic socialists and traditional clerical conservatives all held legislative seats, and were as inclined to ally with like-minded secular parties as with each other.
Brazil was also now a predominantly urban country, and its politics and culture were increasingly defined by its polyglot cities. Although the laws still favored Catholic immigration, the country’s growing wealth and political importance, as well as its place in the Afro-Atlantic economic network, attracted newcomers from throughout the world. The migration of Asians from the sugar and rubber plantations to the cities, which had begun even before 1910, also accelerated, and as the urban Asian quarters grew, their citizens brought relatives from the old country. The nation that had begun the century as a French client with barely fifteen million people had become an economic powerhouse of sixty million and an aspiring world power, and parochialism had less and less place in its politics.
This became even more true in the wake of the Venezuelan wars, when Grão Pará and Brazil proper began to explore a closer association. The two countries had remained separate after the Great War, albeit in personal union, in order to prevent the Grãoparaense from being subjected to the illiberal Brazilian constitution, but after 1909, Brazil itself adopted a liberal political system, and the Venezuelan invasion led to both a sense of shared struggle and a realization of the need for common defense. In 1937, representatives of both governments met under papal auspices for the first in a series of talks that would lead to confederation, with the states remaining formally independent but establishing a common citizenship, standardization of commercial laws, and a permanent commission consisting of members of both parliaments to oversee military and financial matters. Among other things, this would have the effect of bringing the
quilombos, which were represented in the Grãoparaense legislature, into the Brazilian governing structure, and allowing their residents to migrate to the industrial cities and form distinct neighborhoods.
The opening of Brazilian society was gradual and was not without controversy. The legalization of divorce in 1946 caused a storm of protest, and so did the 1949 bill that formally legalized
candomble celebrations even though the anti-
candomble laws hadn’t been enforced for decades. Legalization meant acceptance rather than mere tolerance, and the more conservative Brazilians worried about what else might be accepted down the line. But a majority now had confidence that Brazil could stand on its own, and that ideas from outside enriched rather than threatened it…
Laura Miranda Arias, Catholic Politics in Latin America: A Reader (San Jose Univ. Press, 1988)
…. Mexico stood aloof from the Venezuelan wars [2], and would not be affected by them as the Andean republics or Brazil was, but in other ways, it typified the politics of the time, including the increasing convergence between the more socially-minded Catholic parties and the secular left. It wasn’t destined to be thus: during the early years after the civil war [3], the socialist and Catholic wings of the government clashed frequently, and it was common to refer to the coalition as
el matrimonio malo. After one particularly bitter controversy in 1921, in which the left came out the winner,
La Prensa published a cartoon showing the Catholic parties, in the form of a village woman, shaking a fist at their leftist husband and saying, “you’re lucky I don’t believe in divorce.”
But even then, the factions’ positions often complemented each other. The Catholics made sure that the rural poor would not be forgotten amid the left’s drive to industrialize and that social programs would be administered with a personal touch; the left ensured that the difficulties faced by women would receive attention and that the Church-based social missions would listen to and include them. And as this was happening, control over the major socialist parties shifted from urban intellectuals to their working-class base, which was less inclined to see a contradiction between socialism and religion and whose views on cultural matters were closer to those of the Catholic parties.
By the 1930s, even folk Catholicism had begun to take on aspects of leftist iconography, and vice versa. The devotees of Santa Muerte – who was patron of justice and equality as well as death – gave her the name of “Lady of Labor’s Martyrs,” and unrecognized “saints of labor” were credited with protecting workers from injuries on the job and invoked for inspiration during struggles with industrialists. The Church hierarchy frowned on this syncretism – a few of the “saints of labor” would eventually be canonized, but not until the 1960s and 70s – but the rank and file Catholics who made up the party faithful, and even many party officials, were in sympathy with these practices and the ideas that underlay them.
The convergence became complete in 1932, with the union of the two major Catholic parties and two of the three leftist factions into the Social Catholic Party. This party, with occasional support from the urban Communist Party of Mexico and the middle-class National Liberals, would rule Mexico for the next quarter-century in a manner reminiscent of France during the Red Twenty. The press remained free, and the ruling party could and did lose congressional elections or even state governorships, but its hegemony was never seriously threatened, and anyone who wanted a government scholarship, public employment or other preferment would be wise to support the official orthodoxy. That orthodoxy consisted of tight regulation on business and support for worker-owned enterprises but stopped short of nationalization, embraced feminism within limits – equality in the workplace and public life, but not contraception or divorce – and put the Church’s role in education and poverty relief beyond question. Those who dissented from any of these positions found themselves pushed to the sidelines, denied jobs and subsidies, and in rural areas, all too often ostracized.
Through the 1940s, a combination of fitful repression and rising living standards made the Social Catholics’ rule secure: the pockets of dissent in the cities were small enough to be safely ignored, and the voters’ ability to punish corrupt officials at the polls ensured that those who failed to respect limits were weeded out. But by 1950, cracks were beginning to show. Industrial growth had brought many farmers to the cities, where social control was looser and the outlook more secular; at the same time, the first generation of women who had grown up with political equality were demanding equal status within society and the family. The Social Catholics responded by redoubling their political orthodoxy, but this proved difficult to sustain within the unwritten limits that made up their social contract with the citizens. In 1953, Mexico City elected a Communist mayor, putting the nation’s capital under opposition control, and the streets surrounding the government’s offices became safe havens for protest.
Matters continued in this fashion for some time, with all sides wary about bringing them to a head. What would finally do so would, ironically, be the one thing on which nearly the entire Mexican political spectrum agreed: the revolutions in Central America. Both the Catholic and leftist branches of the coalition had particular reason to hate the Salvadoran regime, and both also opposed the increasing repression in Honduras and Guatemala, but
how to oppose those things would become a matter of contention…
… If Mexico was the country in which Blanco’s wars had the least impact, Colombia – and of course Venezuela itself – was where they had the most. Blanco’s rule had broken down much of their prewar societies, and the institutions in which people had trusted – political parties, fraternal societies, local government, the military – had all been subverted, discredited or eliminated outright. Both countries had to rebuild their civic life from virtually nothing, and the Church – which was one of the few institutions not completely suborned by the Blanco regime – would play a large part in that reconstruction.
After Blanco’s fall, Venezuela was initially ruled by a military government, which gained some legitimacy by making peace without any loss of territory. This had already been agreed between Britain and the United States as a condition of the latter’s acquiescence to a European invasion of New World soil, but the Venezuelan public wasn’t privy to the agreement, and the junta successfully managed to take credit for it. But even so, the military failed to restore normalcy. Between the damage that the oil industry had sustained during the war, the reluctance of foreign companies to invest in a country that was still unstable, and the burden of reparations to Trinidad and British Guiana, living standards fell to a third of what they had been before the war, and an episode of hyperinflation during 1929-30 wiped out what was left of middle-class savings. The junta fell during the inflationary period, to be replaced by another that managed to stabilize the currency but was faction-ridden and deeply corrupt.
The urban poor, and especially those who had lately been well-paid skilled workers or middle-class clerks, turned their anger on the military, which was already compromised by its role during the Blanco era. They also turned their fury on the immigrants who had come to Venezuela during flush times, accusing the Jamaican, Haitian and Central American oil workers of stealing jobs and spreading disease. In 1932, these tensions erupted into a riot in Caracas in which many immigrants and Afro-Venezuelans were massacred, and when the army intervened, to outright rebellion against the military government.
What followed was a war of notable brutality even by the standards of civil conflict. Within days of the rebellion’s outbreak, the army had split into factions, with some supporting the junta, some backing the populist-nativist rioters, and some opportunistically seeking personal power. Each was ruthless not only against its enemies but the neighborhoods and villages that were their strongholds, and disappearances and mass executions became commonplace. The immigrants who were unable to flee the country formed militias of their own in order to survive, turning neighborhoods into fortresses and holding them against all comers.
But at the same time, in the interior, several state governors succeeded in maintaining neutrality and declaring their states to be sanctuaries from the fighting. These states, grouped in a loose federation, were founded on a grass-roots Catholic politics, led not by the organized Church (which had been subjugated by Blanco and which, due to the political instability, had been only partially restored) but by the underground Church that had been a center of opposition during the Blanco era. The parish priests and lay leadership of the underground congregations took Benedict XV’s proclamation against nationalism more seriously than almost any other, declaring that their territories were trusteeships rather than nations and offering sanctuary to Venezuelans and immigrants alike who escaped the carnage along the coast.
These regions proved able to repel attack from without, especially since the military factions concentrated their main efforts on each other, but not to counterattack or to stop the fighting. Nor were foreigners: in 1934, a Brazilian-led force seized the oil fields of the Orinoco Belt, but was unwilling to commit forces to occupy the remainder of the country, and faced frequent attacks from the militias. With the factions evenly matched, the civil war settled into a metastable affair of raids and ambushes between militia-controlled territories and campaigns against suspected supporters of rival factions, and precisely because it had become a low-grade conflict rather than an all-out war, it lasted nine years.
What finally broke the impasse was intervention from the west. Colombia, too, had spent four years under Blanco’s rule, but nearly all of this had been wartime, and its institutions hadn’t been as thoroughly subverted as Venezuela’s. The prewar political parties, especially the
tavaristas who had been complicit in Blanco’s takeover, were discredited, but the institutions that played an opposition role, including the Church and many local mayors, still commanded respect, and the state remained coherent enough to organize a constitutional convention after the end of the war. Like the underground churches of Venezuela, this convention was dominated by supporters of Benedict XV’s anti-nationalist proclamation: it kept the Blanco-era reversion to the name Gran Colombia, not as a threat against its neighbors, but as a statement that it was only part of a larger Venezuelan-Andean community that it hoped would be created. The new constitution was also informed by Catholic principles of subsidiarity – another idea that Celestine and Benedict had emphasized – and created a multi-tiered, decentralized state based on village and neighborhood councils. This was, ironically, another of Blanco’s innovations: during the war, his
cabildos had been instruments of social control rather than a return to colonial-era local democracy as he had promised, but after his fall, they came into their own as bodies of local self-rule.
Postwar Gran Colombia was far from a perfect democracy. Although the feudal landlords’ rule had been broken during Blanco’s time, many of the local councils became mini-theocracies controlled by the Church and the upper peasantry or urban professionals, and the illiberal social attitudes of small towns were imposed on the cities. Also, the system of indirect elections, in which each layer of government chose the next higher layer, meant that the people had relatively little control over the national authorities and the ruling coalition in Bogotá tended to be self-perpetuating. But the emphasis on Catholic social teaching meant that inequality was significantly reduced and that living standards among the peasantry and urban poor rose dramatically. And – most critically for its policy toward Venezuela – the government had an ideological commitment to resist oppressive regimes and build a Catholic community of nations.
By 1941, there was a consensus in Bogotá that the violence in Venezuela posed a threat to Gran Colombia’s stability, and combined with the ruling group’s view of the war as criminal in its own right, this was enough to tip the scales in favor of intervention. In April of that year, Bogotá recognized the alliance of sanctuary states as the legitimate Venezuelan government, and at the invitation of that alliance – an invitation that was widely, and truthfully, suspected to have been diplomatically arranged – its troops crossed the border. By this time, none of the militias, even those that had once been units of the regular Venezuelan army, were capable of standing up to a modern military force: by the end of the year, the Colombians were in control on the ground, and resistance from a war-weary populace ceased soon after.
A constitutional convention met in Caracas in mid-1942, with the sanctuary states as organizers and Gran Colombia carefully staying in the background, and in early 1943 it reported out a charter much like its western neighbor’s. Colombian troops withdrew by 1944, but state companies from Bogotá played a major role in rehabilitating Venezuela’s infrastructure and oil fields, and the ruling parties of the two countries grew steadily closer. In 1952, Gran Colombia and Venezuela concluded a treaty of association that, while leaving each country with its own government, citizenship and international relations, guaranteed the freedom to live and work across the border and pledged to create a common currency and military force… [4]
… To the south, the Venezuelan conflict also had its echoes. Volunteers who returned from fighting under the papal banner catalyzed the growing discontent with Manuel Tavares’ rule in Peru: with the nineteenth-century class system broken and land reform achieved [5], the
raison d’etre for Tavares’ seizure of power no longer existed, and his highly reactionary social policies provoked increasing opposition. Disaffection grew in the cities and, critically, in the army; although Tavares was able to contain the opposition until his death in 1933, his successor lacked his personal authority and was overthrown by a junior officers’ revolt later in that year.
The junta, which was well aware of its Venezuelan counterpart’s fall, realized that an outright military government would be unable to sustain legitimacy for long. Instead, it created a praetorian democracy, with three parties – Liberal, Conservative and Agrarian – each led by civilians sympathetic to the regime and each following a broadly similar platform of Catholic social teaching, preservation of land reform and Church-managed workers’ trusts, and cautious cultural liberalization. Cautious, for the most part, meant
very cautious; censorship was relaxed, foreign entertainment and alcohol were more freely available, and an independent press was allowed for the first time since 1912, but family law remained as conservative as ever and, along with Ecuador, Chile and certain Central American countries, Peru remained one of the few Latin American states to deny the vote to women.
Despite the carefully managed political system, the 1940s still brought controversy. Feminism and opposition to the remaining censorship laws grew among the professional class in Lima, and factions of the Agrarian party, which drew much of its support from the indigenous people that Tavares had enfranchised, began to question the forced Catholicization of the
indios. The junta had left this policy unchanged from the
tavarista era, and as social freedom grew in the cities, the indigenous villagers chafed under their status as
de facto wards of the Church and resented the suppression of their folkways. The staid Peruvian parliament became the scene of arguments and even fistfights, and the military-Church partnership that really ran the state found itself facing an uncomfortable amount of real political passion.
The same controversy was playing out in Bolivia, albeit in markedly different fashion. As in Mexico, the Bolivian civil war had left the country in the hands of a socialist-Catholic alliance, but here, after the 1921 election, the socialists rather than the Catholic parties had the upper hand. Both factions favored land reform and enfranchisement of the
indio majority, and both held a paternalistic belief that the indigenous people needed to be modernized, but they split on whether such modernization should involve Catholic education or organization into politically conscious collective farms. Mayors and provincial governors followed varying policies in this regard, sometimes undoing the work of their predecessors and leading to factions developing among the corps of itinerant teachers and rural doctors.
This tug-of-war would have an effect that neither the left nor the Catholic parties anticipated: the emergence of a third faction among the
indios, organized around local control of native-title lands and preservation of cultural rights. Although both of the ruling groups had spoken in favor of indigenous rights, neither had really thought of the
indios as having political consciousness of their own. The 1933 election, in which charismatic Aymara leader Inti Torres narrowly won the presidency against a divided field and in which his party won the balance of power in the Congress, thus came as a surprise.
Torres’ first administration didn’t last its full term: the army wasn’t yet ready for an
indio president, and after two turbulent years, it overthrew him and orchestrated an election which the moderate Catholic parties won. But in the meantime, Torres had achieved several reforms, including a transition from appointed to elected local governments, the elevation of the Aymara and Quechua languages to official status, and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the freedom of cultural expression. The succeeding government’s attempt to undo these reforms met with widespread resistance, as indigenous villagers continued to recognize the authority of their elected mayors rather than appointed ones and, with the help of sympathetic
jajis, created their own schools.
By this time, also, the Church was coming to terms more and more with political liberalism, and religious coercion made it uneasy. Its approach to indigenous peoples was increasingly to meet them halfway by recognizing culturally appropriate rituals such as those they had approved in N'Délé and Portuguese Africa. [6] After 1938, when broad authorization was given to local bishops to approve usages for their dioceses, committees of Bolivian priests, many of them
indios themselves, began to develop rites that included native music and cultural elements. This combined with a more tolerant attitude toward private syncretism (albeit a continued rejection of it in public ritual) to reduce the tensions between the
indios and the Church. The socialists too learned to accept local control over land use, and recognized that if the indigenous people were to form collectives, they would do so on their own terms. By 1950, matters had reached the point where Torres was elected again, this time with the support of a coalition, and some wondered whether a similar approach might work in Peru…
… Ecuador, unlike Peru and Bolivia, came out of the Decade of Revolutions with its class system largely intact. Its government was organized along Belgian lines as a partnership between the Church, the military, the business community and the large landowners, with Catholic social teaching implemented largely through informal pressure and state-run foundations rather than through land reform and legislation. [7] To an extent, this gave the Ecuadorian regime more short-term stability, but it also increased the harvest of discontent down the line. Veterans of the Venezuelan wars, many of them peasants or urban workers, returned to a country where their status was a matter of grace rather than rights and where, if they were
indios, they still lacked the franchise or land tenure. Many wondered why Gran Colombia – which had been aided by Ecuadorian troops in expelling Blanco’s troops from its soil – had built a state where social and economic equality were priorities while Ecuador itself was denied such things.
Ecuador’s “kinder, gentler feudalism” could go in only two directions: it could become less feudal, or it could become less kind. The threatened upper class chose the second path: beginning in the later 1930s, the government became increasingly repressive, the army’s role became more overt, and independent civic and social organizations were systematically shut down. By the 1940s, the Church itself was forced into opposition: the Curia’s growing insistence on political democracy was unwelcome in Quito, and the feudalist-military alliance stripped religious institutions of their governmental role and, as its Salvadoran counterpart had done, encouraged the growth of Protestant congregations. [8] While Ecuador never became a
de facto slave state like El Salvador, the withdrawal of even lip service from Catholic social teaching meant that its repression became racialized, with the
indios taking the brunt of state violence and the feudalists re-establishing unfettered control over their estates.
In 1952, the tensions in Ecuador boiled over with the outbreak of a rebellion among indigenous villagers in the Andes. This grew into a low-level conflict that drew in the
mestizo peasants of the lowlands as well as the meager left and many parish priests. Both the army and the landlords responded with death squads, and by the middle 1950s, the situation was increasingly spiraling out of control…
Carlos Fernandez Cuevas, Radicalism in Twentieth-Century South America (La Paz: Univ. Mayor de San Andres Press, 2005)
… Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, the
gaucho republics looked on the Andean states, Central America and Chile with a combination of dismay and self-satisfaction. Their revolutions, or so they thought, had been completed in the nineteenth century; they had grown into stable, prosperous and cohesive republics, and the Catholic radicalism that had taken root elsewhere in Latin America had failed to gain purchase among them. With the exception of industrial Paraguay, they all had similar societies based on agriculture and ranching, the romance of the frontier, and paternalistic politics. Low population density, high living standards and relaxed social attitudes made such politics more palatable than elsewhere, and the republics’ genteel parliaments saw no reason why they couldn’t last forever.
In fact, they were simply not paying attention. They were correct in believing that Andean radicalism, both on the left and the right, was a poor cultural fit, but they were nations of immigrants, and they weren’t immune to the radicalism of Europe. Their historic ties to Italy meant that they continued to draw immigrants from that country during the 1920s and 30s, many of whom were socialists or anarchists; they also drew radical immigrants from Catalonia during the Spanish troubles, from Hungary, and from the Balkans. The new arrivals’ political visions were secular rather than religious, but they were no less inimical to semi-feudal ways of life.
Uruguay was the first domino to fall. It was more urbanized than the other
gaucho states – its capital accounted for almost a third of its population – and also more industrial. It was also the closest
gaucho republic to Buenos Aires, which had grown into a diverse industrial state with mass politics and a powerful labor movement. In the 1941 election, the most sharply contested in Uruguay’s recent history, a coalition of anarchist and socialist trade unions took a narrow majority in the General Assembly and missed winning the presidency by less than two percent.
The years that followed were known as the Years of the Veto, with the president and congress repeatedly nullifying each other’s initiatives and several coup attempts narrowly averted by loyalist officers. In the meantime, a similar leftist coalition, this time with support from the populist right, took power in Córdoba and began a thorough land reform program. Piratini avoided a similar fate by only a slight margin in 1944, with the left winning the mayoralty of Porto Alegre and the traditional parties only able to keep control of the parliament by joining together.
By now, the remaining republics realized that they could no longer ignore the prospect of mass political movements. Entre Rios and Patagonia were the least urban of the
gaucho states, but they too had growing cities, increasing immigrant populations and calls for land reform, and the Patagonian ruling class’s legitimacy had been eroded by its poor performance in the Mapuche war. The governing parties were divided between those that wanted to suppress the left and those that favored co-opting it, and elections became contentious as they split into factions, but there were already too many new voters to make repression practical, and by the late 1940s, both had embarked on moderate land reform and social-insurance programs while at the same time restricting immigration.
Both would succeed in pre-empting more radical unrest, at least in the short term. But in Uruguay and Piratini, matters had reached the point of no return. In 1951, the Uruguayan left broke the deadlock by electing Sandro Michelini, a labor leader with anarchist sympathies, to the presidency. The voters of Piratini would never get the chance to do the same thing: rather than face an election in 1952 that he was likely to lose, the incumbent president staged an auto-coup and took emergency powers with the support of the military. The
gaucho republics, which had a fraternal relationship just a decade before, were now looking warily at their neighbors lest popular unrest or military repression spill across the border. Nothing in their political history had prepared them for such things, and they were one wrong move from a crisis that would test the emerging international system…
… In the meantime, Chile’s military government was also running into trouble. Its standing was also badly tarnished by the Mapuche war, and while its policy of autarky and import substitution had protected local jobs in the short term, it also led to increasing shortages and economic stagnation. The decline in inequality caused by minimum wage laws and government-sponsored construction jobs masked this stagnation for a time, but by 1935, living standards were falling and the fragile gains of the 1920s were being eroded.
The government survived the 1930s because there was no real alternative. The socialists had been crushed after their revolution failed [9], independent trade unions and civil-society groups had been co-opted or disbanded, and the nineteenth-century liberal and conservative parties were both discredited and without the capacity to reorganize themselves. Also, even then, the army was able to frighten businessmen and industrialists with the threat of communism, and to keep the workers in line with the specter of the old ruling class returning.
This wore increasingly thin as time passed, though: in 1945, real wages had fallen to barely above depression-era levels, the infrastructure was crumbling, and fear of the military no longer prevented wildcat strikes. The government went through a series of cabinet reshuffles that amounted to palace coups by one military faction against another; by 1948, the government had abandoned autarky, repealed the 1915 law against foreign investment and announced an ambitious program of economic restructuring. But this, too, only made things worse: with barriers to foreign entry removed all at once, cheap imports flooded the market and unemployment rose to levels unseen since the early 1910s. Another reshuffle within the junta sought to restore some support to local industries, but this was poorly executed – indeed, actively sabotaged by officers who were profiting from the import trade – and largely ineffective. As the 1950s drew on, Chile was becoming a nation of people with nothing to lose…
_______
[1] See post 3570.
[2] See post 4462.
[3] See post 3324.
[4] Remember how Colombia is always the Lebanon of South America, torn apart by internal violence and reduced to a plaything by its neighbors? Well, I remember too. TTL’s Venezuelan civil war, BTW, is loosely based on the violence in OTL Colombia during the 1940s and 50s.
[5] See post 3570.
[6] See post 4683.
[7] See post 3570.
[8] See post 5447.
[9] See post 3584.
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