Río de la Plata Basin, what potential does it have?

So, Río de la Plata Basin is 1.2 million square mile area in South America. It is a Humid Sub Tropical Climate by Koppen’s definition, has good soil, and is interconnected by rivers which eventually drain into the ocean. It has almost everything a civilization needs to emerge with a huge population, that could likely dominate most of South America.

In the original timeline, it wasn’t settled very thoroughly by Europeans until relatively late after the Natives were devastated by disease, but much of it still ended ended up being some of the wealthiest and more populous areas of Latin America.

So some questions I have are...

1: What is the likely carrying capacity of the region with pre industrial technology?

2: Could it have become a Native American China or India with early PoD?

3: Why did it take so long for the area to get a larger European population?

4: Are there any TLs where a power based out of there becomes a Super Power?
 
Argentina has a more unstable political history and is farther from Europe than the US and Canada are. This tends to lead to fewer immigrants. WWI mucking with commodity prices, successive economic instability, and the rise of Peron and Peronist economics didn't help much either.

Yes, the country industrialized under Peron, but industrialization =/= being richer than otherwise. If your comparative advantage is in commodities and/or services, then it's wiser to stick with that. There are also just better ways of state-backed industrialization than the Import Substitution methods attempted OTL (see South Korea and Japan for example).



If you keep Uruguay part of Argentina (thus preventing Buenos Aires from dominating the country) you could have a more stable politics. I think that the fact that economic and political power in the US and Canada were diffuse had to do with their relative stability OTL.

If you avoid WWI you have a richer Argentina too I think. Post-WWI, based off of my understanding, it's too tricky to make Argentina successful.



An Argentina that retains Bolivia and Uruguay (Paraguay seems too much of a headache to hold) and manages to keep a steady ship could be a powerful polity.
 
The basin is comparable to the Mississippi, the North European Plain, and northern China. If it were owned by a single country, it would be valuable indeed. The only problem is that it is contested between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia. If the Natives had cattle or horses, they most certainly could have created a civilization like the ones you described. I think that numerous factors prevented large scale immigration, the most important being political instability and the simple fact that the US was a more attractive destination. I've been interested in South American superpower TLs as well, maybe with the Viceroyalty surviving intact.
 
1: What is the likely carrying capacity of the region with pre industrial technology?

2: Could it have become a Native American China or India with early PoD?

3: Why did it take so long for the area to get a larger European population?

4: Are there any TLs where a power based out of there becomes a Super Power?
In order
1) Unknown but pretty high. Eyeballing it I would say that at least around Frace and the Iberian peninsula together. Though I would need to know how "primitive" we are talking about here.
2) No, that area was very low on population and was probably one of the last places on Earth colonized by humans (and I mean in general, not European colonization)
3) Because it lacked political stability and had no valuable resources. Also because it was frikin far away from Europe.
4) I think a few? I don't kniw about super power but great powers I know a few.
 
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Without horses and cattle, at best the natives could have something comparable to the Inca Empire with corn, potatoes, llamas and alpaca. But they didn’t have agriculture IOTL.
 
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