AH SHIT IT'S SUPERJUNTA TIME
Nation Name: South American Popular Union (SAPU)
Append 'Sudamerica' to references of Carabobo. Extended lyrics in use, but no full version of the anthem appears extant on the 'net. Note irony of using Venezuelan Bolivarian song while not holding Venezuela's clay.
Capital: Nuevo Bolívar, built upon the ruins of Manaus. A pre-war project by PFNC affiliates, the ambitious plans of expansion into an infrastructural focal point of the South Americas, home to new industry, continental maglev railways, and new advances in citywide ecological living, incorporating green power as a proof-of-concept. Though initially embraced by SASU authorities, the expense of the foundations, half-complete maglev terminals and of building over the old city stage-by-stage proved far too much for the bankrupted union to handle, and was subsequently canceled as 'wasteful' and 'socially unconscious' by the ruling parties of the time, with some level of spiteful comment about 'fascistic compensation by monumental architecture' as the government distanced itself from the now-pariah neofuturists and what, by all means, would appear an ideologically mutual project. The project was (with occasional practical revision) immediately greenlighted by Ramon on his ascendancy, with the primary works completed by 2068, and secondary works completed by 2070. It was officially declared as capital in 2065, the first project being a skyscraping city hall, now the primary seat of government.
Territory: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, French Guiana (protectorate)
Government: Consolidationist presidential dictatorship; no official party system, no state, no opposition, governance being a matter 'by the state and peoples of South America for the states and peoples of South America, indivisibly.' Unofficial party organizations are more along the lines of loose policy-centered groupings than cemented blocs, which are officially banned. State policy is slanted towards unity, mutual defense and economic & political integration. State-based subdivision of governance and localized democracy; presidential power holds primacy over such.
Military: SAPU's military model is a largely modern/postmodern one, centered around shock and awe, the war of movement, and the uprooting of resistance. Following the great brain drain from the emergent (and largely aggresively expansionist militarist-authoritarian) powers, not merely accelerating its modernization efforts, but granting a growing, developmental technological edge in the fields of individual infantry weapons & protection, armored combat, and militarized application of piloted robotics. These standards are being prepared for unilateral upgrade, and the myriad new design models- from what we can glean- are being drawn up to facilitate rapid production within the corporatist system, likely leaving a great deal of obsolescent surplus.
The strength-enhancing exoskeleton of yesteryear- sans integrated armor, instead being vest-overlaid- is standard issue, and the adoption of state-of-the-art powersuits is top priority. On the opposite end of this issue, necessity of anti-material, anti-suit weapons has necessitated the adoption of higher velocity, higher caliber weapons, for which the current generation of electromagnetic weapons is considered too unreliable for field work by SAPU military authorities- coil guns as size & power inefficient for micro to macroscale, railguns for remaining problems with abalation & insulation even after two world wars and technological generations of refinement, necessitating barrel change- and instead advanced ballistics are the order of the day for infantry weapons, leading to an across-the-board upgunning as an interim. Present existence of the obsolete but effectual ARCO-2 platform, when combined with SAPU's advance in the field, suggests worrisome developments to come. Intel presently insufficient to make further statement.
[ARSENAL UNIÓN CLASIFICADOS. Pendiente de aprobación.]Economy: Corporatist model of both state and private corporate entities, based around collective, cooperative management by all involved, resembling after some fashions both the top-down fascist model and the bottom-up Roman Catholic model heavily rationalized by the emergence of digital management of capital, on some level balanced by protectionist allowance of foreign market entrance, without allowance for foreign market control. The economic base is autarkic, based around exploitation of resources by native industry to produce products for domestic consumption as well as (as of now limited) global trade. The industrial base is fairly robust despite the corporatist system, with individual unions- most equipped with state-of-the-art robotic manufactories for bulk work, managed and checked over by the new class of 'engineer-artisans'- collaborating with one another for maximal profit and production without uncooperative strain put on the managers & workers. This is speaking ideally, of course; the inclination towards good use of resources does not always define such as frugal.
History
In the present historical narrative of the Empire of America, the history of its confederation-turned-absolutist state begins in 2022, in the Unification with Canada during the collapse of the British Commonwealth, a mutually beneficial act in accordance with the New Manifest Destiny. Outside of this revisionist purview (or perhaps within the confines of another) the beginning of the Empire is substantially less romantic. A result of intergovernmental collusion and early 21st century quasi-dictatorialism, an order by financial-corporate entities for the conquest and consolidation of markets. This, of course, was let by without overmuch protest from the by then paralyzed public, during the beginnings of the great Social Cataclysm, but the narrative does not smooth out so well in the rest of the Americas.
By 2026, Mexico had been reduced to a shamble by interior and exterior troubles, with the war between civilian Autodefensas and the intelligence-supported cartels having come to a boil. Meanwhile, amongst the Latino (and primarily Mestizo) population of immigrants in America, hard times had increased the popularity of the unfeasible 'Aztlan' idea of their own manifest destiny, and the southerlies of America had grown only more inflamed in ethnic tension and economic slump thanks to flood of unskilled, unassimilating labor. When the time came for the annexation of Mexico and unveiling of the Amero and so on within the plans of the nebulous entities behind the troubles of the 2020s and 2030s, this engineered social cataclysm began to spiral out of any direct control; there would be no peaceable unification with Mexico, as while its puppet government was on board, its puppet government was also butchered to the last in a series of disastrous coups by mestizo nationalists. Thus Mexico's entry into the National bloc against the Global, or so the narrative goes; like all things, the reality is substantially more hazy than the post-cleaning narrative.
The combination of Mexico's new pseudopopulist (as well as anarchic and incompetent) governance alongside the nationalist-expansionist aspirational doctrine of its populace was enough of an insult to the global bloc, but the new Mexico's tentative leanings into the National bloc during the neo-ethnocentrist hysteria in Europe was a matter that could not be ignored, thus necessitating military intervention. In the Imperial narrative, Mexico's annexation took three years; a technically correct half-truth. While Imperial authorities much glorify the wartime acts of President Washington and the valiance of its soldiers, the military campaign against Mexico's ailing military was a joke, over within three months and Mexico formally annexed. What the revision leaves out in propping up an image of three years of war against a strong governmental Mexico leaves out is the actuality of three years of war against militia and cartel guerrillas and the uncompromisingly brutal campaign of antiterrorist action and repression, leaning more on strikes by thousands of pounds of munitions than raids by boots on the ground. Thus repeated through the next five years in the rest of central America.
Amidst the war, South America was dealing with its own troubles of collapsing market economies, ethnic tensions, and a public calling for greater governmental transparency and accountability through every state. Corruption and dictatorialism had only grown more rampant. For both the aging, incompetent oligarches and semicompetent elder statesmen, the threat of overthrow was incredibly problematical. The oligarches perverted the impetus of populism to their own ends, in partnership with domestic multinationals. They exploited the fear of a resurgent imperial America, of a new Big Stick doctrine; a bloc was erected against Norteamericana, manufactured by the globalists and intended only as an opponent to be overcome, in the form of the Unión Sudamericana de Socialistas: the South American Union of Socialists, formed and trademarked 2039. Loosely-confederated governments based in the New Left of social justice and soft-communism holding an end to the corruptions of global capitalism in the open hand, and in the hidden, wantonly enjoined with it. An ineffectual morass of governments only unified in passive repressiveness and populational-subgroup divisionism, with a hint of the active repression towards anyone threatening to this order, and unlike the previous governments, held no predilections against offering the global bloc not merely favorable prices, but prices outright extortionistic against the South American nations, such arrangements thoroughly cleaned from the books and public facing. To the casual observer, SASU-USDS was a legitimate communist bloc (the notion itself being self-contradictory) while to anyone else, it was yet another puppet in the greater game.
By 2050, the intentional collapse of SASU had begun, the markets self-destructing, the corporate managers fleeing, and the guns turning on the populace to keep the blood from flowing too high. By 2053, the floodgates were open, and SASU as anything other than an organizational framework for its successor was dead. The New Left had rotted South America from the inside-out, raped it, destroyed its economies and stole away the identities of its people that it proclaimed as seeking to doggedly protect; all that could follow was the next hysteria of Jacobinesque revolutionism, and it was this hysteria that kicked off the Regime Wars that would kill millions. Each state became less an ordered cooperation of individuals (although such could only be loosely applied to the sociopaths-turned-psychopaths that made up the ruined South Americans) and more of a food chain; the man with even a spot of luxury, humility, faith, or independence was preyed upon by the militiamen-hysteric-butcher, whose mind was preyed upon and controlled by the political officer-hysteric-butcher, who was cynically ordered to action by the idealogue-hysteric-butcher, whom made up the New Left soviet-juntas that preyed upon the whole, and jealously assailed one another. An entire continent given over to brush-war insanity. And just as the namesake, original Jacobin insanity had given way to a revolutionary strongman, so too did this one in the rise of Ramon M. Leon Albino. And to understand the climax of SASU's downfall, to understand what follows, one must understand the apparent character of el Unificador.
Ramon was a peculiar birth, taking place on New Year's Eve and coming forth to the world at the time of countdown, a fact he would later both romanticize and joke about as a 'birth of the millennium.' Through his youth, he lived in his home country of Chile, by all means a rather stable and prosperous nation to live within in the time period and region. He was neither high class nor low, occupying a comfortable middling position where he was free to dabble in pursuits outside of career, and to this end he acquired a particular love of speculative fiction, realistic or fantastical, and of esoterical politics, not so much believing in the latter as being fascinated. Bright, up and coming, and civilly nationalistic while internationally romantic, he spurred both military service and his father's steel working career, both for too little impact on the world at large, and the latter for a solely economic contribution to a local community. Ramon desired to do more, joining the Chilean police force in 2020, passing exceptionally in the academy and after distinguished service and further exams in 2023, pressed into the Grupo de Operaciones Policiales Espaciales - GOPE.
The beginning of Ramon's service in GOPE was only briefly domestic, and he was soon on loan to an INTERPOL task force against the cartels in Colombia. He served competently, but being rather sheltered- believing what he came to experience as a matter of fiction and tragedy, a faraway remnant of earlier, less enlightened times in the past century, not present reality- was shocked by the brutality he observed amongst the cartel's actions. From there ignited a passion for a level of justice against this brutality, from which much of his later character can be derived. Operational focus later moved to Mexico, a move which he could not understand at the time. The Colombians were virtually annihilated, and without this heart of the trade, much product would not go northwards in the first place. His questioning remained purely internal then, and Ramon set into his work with gusto, privately investigating the matter of the ceasing of operations in Colombia through both digital archive and paper records. What he discovered turned his image of an international delivery of justice upside-down; at the heart of the Cartel operation, what he had previously considered novel conspiracy theory was a simple truth, in that global intelligence (primarily American) was not merely active in the trade, but running it, with the cartels as middle-men.
The transfer of operations was because the Colombian cartels were never meant to be uprooted in the first place. It was an extermination of dissident stockholders in the trade, not a war against it, a matter of reconsolidation of the CIA's hold. It was no different in Mexico, where he was moving against assets the Americans had deemed as no longer useful. While Ramon fully intended to go public with his discoveries, this would be much delayed, as he was caught up in the beginning of the Third World War in 2026. The American invasion was indiscriminate, caring not for allegiance, banner, or ideological affilation, only armament. Outwardly preaching a notion of the manifest destiny of the continent and of multicultural assimilationism- incompatible with the mestizo nationalism previously tolerated- it was completely uncompromising in the face of any armed forces in the whole of Mexico, formal, criminal or civilian. With INTERPOL withdrawing entirely in the first collapse of the UN, this included Ramon; his status as an agent of foreign nationality meant nothing, and in fact made him a threat, a potential leak, an observer from outside, with an outside bias, capable of forming an unwanted, uncontrolled dialectic.
It was this issue, plus his pressganging into a composite guerrilla group of both civil defenders and Cartel soldiers, that saw Ramon's entry into the Third World War. Front-line fighting was nonexistent, and second-line fighting was short-lived; the ordnance made sure of that. This, and Ramon's explanation of his findings, quickly turned matters into a fighting retreat that decimated the group several times over in their flight to the south to escape the country. Ramon and his newfound comrades would have left that year if not for the blockade by the Americans, seeing to it that no militants might escape by sea or be supplied through it internationally. Ramon's training against Cartel tactics and crash-course in counter-guerrilla work in the Colombian brush managed to save both his life and that of many of the militants, who quickly formed an effective point of resistance in the far south of Mexico. Still, such resistance would not remain so for long, and the militants dispersed rather than be captured after two and a half years, Ramon escaping by freighteer after the loosening of the blockade. Five years of return to domestic police work- no questions asked, none answered- and the war in Central America was over, as was Central America as an independent entity. Of the two general parties he traveled with, Ramon most certainly preferred the company of the civic nationalists and homestead defenders, finding the noveu-ethnicism and anti-American bigotry of the Aztlanist subgroup pointlessly militant and ultimately offputting. He was spared assassination or extradition and execution largely by the America's own ruthless purging of information relating to the occupation and of INTERPOL's spotty records; as far as they were concerned, there was no pre-invasion anti-cartel operation in Mexico, and Ramon had never left Colombia until the successful routing of the cartels. Nevermind that they resurged in the SASU/USDS period, Ramon had surely expunged them, with distinguished service. Knowing the truth of the matter, he found the honor more than dubious.
In the early interwar, Ramon's research into the conspiratorial continued, along with tentative entry into neofuturist groups. He was reinstated into INTERPOL service, and presided over some level of the UN's repression of ethnonational extremist groups of the United States of Europe, further cementing a dislike for radicalism into his character. Three years after the end of the war in 2040, a botched car bomb attack while off-duty in Hamburg nearly took his life, and ended in the amputation of his left leg. He was discharged from GOPE and forced to live by savings and family support; the latter would dry up with SASU/USDS government interventionism, and further due to blacklisting for his activistic leanings. Embittered, his situation would leave him to enter into the neofuturist organization Partido Futurista Nueva Chilena in 2042, comprised primarily of antimodernists and reactionaries. The organization was largely intellectual, with some blue-collar elements, and saw a number of experts in hard scientific fields amongst its membership. Ramon meshed well enough amongst his new peers, largely driven together by the soft persecutions of the new government, and would see to the replacement of his left leg by upper-grade implants on the cheap and off the books of the universal health care system. The organization was nonrevolutionary, and aimed for reform from within and a call for idealism and a careful march into the future. Ramon had some hope that he could play a part in the breaking down of the system's corruption from the inside.
This was not to be.
The party's brushes with neofascistic elements, even as a minority of the PFNC, would earn it more than just the ire of the SASU's intergovernmental arm. The organization was broken up in 2045 and much of the leadership violently purged by kangaroo court or outright execution in no-knock raids and tortures of Sovietesque brutality, Ramon spared solely because of middling position, his spotty attendance to party functions (a result of his crippling and later adjustment to his new implants) and contacts made during his time in law enforcement seeing his and his family's exemption from the purge lists. Neither his contacts nor his family would survive the Regime Wars. While the PFNC was dead, the social cataclysm responsible for its formation was still ongoing, and Ramon maintained shaky contact with underground dissident circles. These organizations became increasingly more militant by 2050, and Ramon maintained distance, fearing deception and governmental entrapment. His contribution in this stage was largely the theoretical, in the vein of bombmaking, poisoning, incriminating information on government officials (what little could be found in a now tightly controlled surface internet and peer-to-peer pirate net) and expertise on CQC and bushwhacking. In 2053, all hell breaks loose.
For certain leftist elements of the populace, the government was simply neither radical enough nor supportive enough. Too much government, too little, welfare was either ineffectually too lean or enslaving, company quotas were too slanted for this group or that one, so-and-so media was degrading to women, men, blacks, whites or hispanics: everyone and everything became a scapegoat, and both the hysteric populace and utterly corrupt government could not come to the conclusion- or else disregarded the conclusion- that it was not the abstracts they had constructed around themselves that were failing, but that they, the slovenly, the stupid, the sociopathic and malevolent, were the failures within the system, the root source of the corruption. As wretched as SASU's marriage of global capitalism and noveau communism was, such could not have been implemented without the tacit consent and support of the populace, whether by deception or self-grown belief. The resulting bloodshed was inevitable, and the matter of numbers decided that of the two camps, the elitists would be slaughtered to the last by the mobbists. On the twenty-fifth of October, 2053, the parliament of SASU was murdered by rioters, and anarchy reigned.
To call this a revolution would imply that there was a unified, specified goal, but the problem is that the goals of the militia-hysterics were neither united nor specific, very quickly descending into rural banditry, urban looting, and mass mutual ethnic cleansing all in the name of 'social justice.' Though the majority of the military was either unaligned or anti-leftist, they had neither the numbers nor the resolve to engage in any effective offensive counteroperation against the mobbists, being very much on the defense and striking concentrations of anarchic activity with ordnance rather than clearing by boots on the ground. This manpower would have to be provided by the populace at large.
In the initial explosion of violence, Ramon's family was hung from the rafters of their steel plant; of his parents and grandparents, none survived, with only his sister and two of his brothers and their children surviving. The extended family suffered worse losses, with secondary lines dying from great aunts and uncles down to the infants, punished for their well-off state as 'oppressors.' The collapse of government left no threat of a coherent action against his dissidence, nor reason to fear such, Ramon was all-in on the militanc7 of the movement. By whatever services and pirate communications were still active, he amalgamated the local resistance groups he had maintained contact with and formed the Serpientes. What followed was a block-by-block purge of Santiago and its surroundings by any means necessary; bomb, fire, chemical agent, machete and bullet, brutal beyond belief, but this response was well within what one might define as 'likeminded engagement,' that is to say the escalation of action in line with the enemy only. The riots were quashed and dispersed in days, and engagements with leftist militias of similar class but not caliber over in weeks. A grateful populace (or what was left of it) rallies around the organization, by now well-equipped enough from sacked armories to be more paramilitary than militia. Similar though less competent organizations and their respective purges are mirrored across the nations of South America, save particularly anarchic Venezuela and its smaller neighbors and the completely sealed French Guiyana.
It is from this point that the party line of SAPU comes that intervention by the Empire of America was inevitable at this point. SASU was meant to collapse and be absorbed, not give way to reactionary futurists and form strong, independent nations again; the successful actions of the paramilitaries against the mob were intolerable, and the global bloc's plans (supposedly) had to accelerate. Under the guise of humanitarian intervention, the Empire once again began an invasion based entirely around the destruction of any foreign armed force, regardless of allegiance or ideology, in 2054. At this point Ramon was leading both from the front in ASTOR-32b suit (a lighter, then current model of the ASTOR-37a) and as figurehead to a fairly vast coalition of groups that would be defined then and later as 'consolidationists' and had earned the support of most of the military, command structure and regular both; remnants of the PFNC and other reactionary circles had coalesced into an emergency government, the so-called Popular Union, with widespread support amongst all but the leftist remnants.
Imperial forces came by all fronts; by land through the Central Americas, navally by Venezuela and Brazil's coastline, as well as attempts at Chilean landings and by airdrop into what remained of the vast jungles and rainforests, expanded somewhat by SASU's environmentalist slant and collapse of the logging industry. By all fronts, they suffered horrendous losses. Anti-thermal nets concealed guerrillas everywhere, military, paramilitary, and even independent civilians with pilfered stocks yet to be rationalized into the SAPU supply train. Drone strikes and airdrop attempts were plagued by stinger missiles and autocannon fire; tanks were lost to deep, wide ditches, mobility kill by mine and rendered combat ineffective by destruction of blast-paneled munitions, or lost turrets to swinging logs reinforced by steel prow. There was no rest for the Imperial soldier, as any major HQ would be plagued by probing attacks and heavy ordnance day and night, while any attempts to rest on the march would end by death in the night. Attempts to uproot the irregulars were impossible; too many ratholes and no idea of where they were. The logistical impossibility of the campaign left the Americans reeling on any assault against SAPU's conventional forces, unable to breach far past the Amazon. The greatest victory for the Americans was likely in Venezuela, which, having suffered the collapse of the oil industry, some of the worst politically sectarian fighting, and all manner of infrastructural sabotage in the invasion, was essentially leveled, a countrywide Stalingrad.
This continued for eleven years.
By then, Ramon was well past his prime, entirely too old by any sane standard to fight or to lead, at 65 years old, but the fight remained in him, and despite many gray hairs and worry-lines, maintained a fighting vigor that has been rendered somewhat mythically in SAPU propaganda, a demonstration of the 'true resolve of the human spirit' as in line with the futurist-idealist mandate. The same could not be said of the Imperial army, which had only barely crawled past the Amazon into central Brazil, and back into a conventional war they were even less prepared to fight, and into the north of Bolivia and Peru, mountainous terrain entirely impossible to advance by, while providing safe positions for observation, artillery and rocketry against American forces. Attempts to land in the further south of Chile and Argentina were met with disaster, anti-air networks decimating the American air force several times over, anti-naval missiles compensating for the lacking naval forces of SAPU and removing any effective support from the naval element to these botched landings. All the while, through the war, the Sons of Liberty- now actively collaborating with the emergency government, having established themselves relatively extensively in South America through the interwar period- were sowing further havoc amongst the Imperial chain-of-command, taking the teeth and eyes both from their ordnance by way of electronic warfare, and utterly eroding popular support for the endeavor in the Empire proper. Thus the signing of the Peace Treaty of A Divided Manifest Destiny, and the expulsion of the Empire's forces from South America.
The global bloc was defeated, the plan for a united America ruined, and South America largely united, bar a withdrawal by Venezuela, Guiyana and Suriname, whom were promptly amalgamated into the Commonwealth after extensive humanitarian aid and suspicious movements in their new, non-SAPU affilated parliament. The nebulous 'other' would have to wait another day for their conquest by proxy. But there remained the problem of rebuilding, and of the peacetime government. By now a revolutionary, heroic figure, Ramon was instated with significant surprise to himself as Presidente Federal by a landslide. By all means, the effort of reconstructing the nations seemed impossible, but Ramon, having no particular formal education in governance or economics, dispensed with the entire idea of 'expense' and instead took to the idealized neofuturist mandate for inspiration. The powers of the emergency government simply were not dispensed with, and Ramon established a semi-command, interventionist economy, focusing all efforts on welfare, on rationalization, on the reestablishment of infrastructure and the construction of radical new industries. Money had no meaning but that given to it, and so it was used as intended: an object of abstracted value of labor, used in the exchange of labor for product or productivity. The result was an economic recovery that by all means seemed impossible, and from the rubble, cities sprang up overnight, constructed for this generation and by all manner of style, from the neoclassical to the speculative space-age, servicing a revitalized and vibrant populace. Corporations of all size and manner formed up similarly, infused and run by a committe of expertise, not capital, cooperating as needed to maximize production and profit.
It was to no surprise, then, that South America once again became the nation of sanctuary, political dissidents the world over- and all their expertise- fleeing for asylum. Reactionary-fascists of the Reich, leaning towards third instead of fourth position, and the communists of the second, too, ethnic and religious minorities of the ruthlessly expansionist Yugoslav state, American republicans and democrats, Chinese nationalists, Japanese Buddhists. The domestic explosion was incredible, to be sure, but the brain drain was unprecedented, with American physicists and aeronautics experts in particular being shuttled out by the Sons of Liberty, while others escaped by any means of emigration they had, legal or illegal, under true or false pretenses. With this level of diversity, one might expect a mandate of active multiculturalism, but this idea is rejected entirely by SAPU as 'intentionally divisive, a ploy for partisanism and quotas,' citing the brief hyperbalkanization of the Regime Wars. One might also expect sectarian violence amongst the immigrant populations, either on ethnic, political, or religious grounds, but desperation and a mutual camaraderie in exile has quashed such entirely- plus the previous runs of such violence in the previous decades still in memory and in mind- resulting in quite a fair amount of cultural exchange. The fact that the violent radicals and foreign agitators- the 'hystericals' as the government has come to call them- seem to shortly disappear, most certainly helps. It is of some note how many oversea flights certain SAPU governmental aircraft seem to make, and always under strong EM field.
It has been five years since the beginning of this peculiar state, and seventy since the birth of Ramon M. Leon Albino. In this time, SAPU has grown bold, heated, simmered its way towards another economic explosion, another outburst of ingenuity. A sleeping giant. Ramon himself has slowed somewhat, but the spring has not left his step. At the cost of some odd millions of hysterics and American soldiers, he has secured for his adopted people the status of a great power. Time will tell if the South American state will last; but it can be said with some authority that they will not go quietly, and not without a fight.
