WI No Antonio López de Santa Anna

When and how did Antonio bite it? Because if he never lived at all, Mexico would be unrecognizable by the time of the Mexican-American War. In the later days of the Revolution, he was the leader and champion of the faction that wanted a notionally republican state that was also racist, militarist, and somewhat deferential to the Church. To my mind he had few or no understudies - if he goes down that early, his whole vision goes down with him, and it's a struggle between de Iturbide's constitutional monarchists with extreme deference to Church, and Vicente Guerrero's secular democracy with racial equality. Guerrero will lose because supporting him is against the self-interest of everyone but the Indian campesino. With that, who can say if or how Texas happens?

If Santa Anna had died later, say around 1843, then it depends on who succeeds him, but I have to say his generals were of much the same cloth as him by that point - he'd promoted men who thought like him, which meant self-absorbed gloryhounds who held their men's lives cheap. I don't know who would have done better by that point.

Kill him in 1830 and I have few ideas about what you'd have a decade later.

So when and how are you offing the fellow?
 
Given how Santa Anna was a glory hound and a incredibly awful head of state, getting rid of him would benefit Mexico on the long run. But now, on how we off him:

  • If he's offed during the War of Independence, he would be just another officer gone KIA. Nothing of relevance, except that it might butterfly off the political jockeying in the 1830's. However, if Iturbide still becomes Emperor, it will become an absolute monarchy, with a Military Junta at his side instead of the doomed Congress. Or if we get a congress, it will be a Spaniard-dominated one or a more moderate-liberal one.
  • If offed during the Battle of Veracruz or in San Juán de Ulúa, this will butterfly off the Plan de Veracruz and the Plan de Casa Mata. Republican plots will still happen every now and then, until every former insurgent gets killed.
  • If offed during the 1930's, the problem will be trying to wind down the hostilities between liberals and conservatives, which were (partly) instigated by him playing both sides for his own ends (and some meddlesome American politician called Joel R. Pointsett at some point). Maybe we'll have Martín Carrera or another former war hero trying to achieve this.
  • If offed during the 1840's see above.
  • And the latest he can get offed is after he's toppled after the end of the Mexican War for high treason.
 
Who was in charge of Mexico in, IIRC, 1821, when Moses Austin negotiated the original Anglo land grants in Texas? Which factions supported this move, and which were opposed? Would the settlement still occur without Santa Anna?

In the long run, this is one of the most consequential events in early Mexican history.
 
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