I forgot to comment on this, but damn, they got what they deserve. Absolutely crazy these fucks were willing to throw the Mexican Empire to the pits of hell rather than accept the ceasefire. I only wished we had more info of their deaths.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
New Orleans could functionally end up as a Treaty Port regardless. I'm thinking it could be 50 years (not sure *where* I got that number from.
) before US Troops pull out of New Orleans. Actually, I think the problem with the comparison is literally going to be lack of countries able to participate in the treaty port concept. After the CEW, you'll have the UK, Germany and Spain in Europe who might be interested. Russia will never be Naval oriented enough to pull this off, Italy will be laser focused on the Med and I think it is too far for the Japanese. And while Brazil may be powerful enough, I'm guessing the US will not be comfortable with that. (And the US will be close to having Veto power) Mexico, OTOH might be allowed.
France may still want to flex and not acknowledge the amount of ass it's had kicked postwar, maybe the soft power business side of French politics could try out that endeavor.New Orleans could functionally end up as a Treaty Port regardless. I'm thinking it could be 50 years (not sure *where* I got that number from.
Actually, I think the problem with the comparison is literally going to be lack of countries able to participate in the treaty port concept. After the CEW, you'll have the UK, Germany and Spain in Europe who might be interested. Russia will never be Naval oriented enough to pull this off, Italy will be laser focused on the Med and I think it is too far for the Japanese. And while Brazil may be powerful enough, I'm guessing the US will not be comfortable with that. (And the US will be close to having Veto power) Mexico, OTOH might be allowed.
As a quick comment on this, while I was going through countries I forgot the interesting possibility of *Haiti* being one of the nations with a Treaty Port. (Might be a situation where US Allies get in automatically? (So Nicaragua, Haiti, Peru, Bolivia & Argentina).New Orleans could functionally end up as a Treaty Port regardless. I'm thinking it could be 50 years (not sure *where* I got that number from.
Actually, I think the problem with the comparison is literally going to be lack of countries able to participate in the treaty port concept. After the CEW, you'll have the UK, Germany and Spain in Europe who might be interested. Russia will never be Naval oriented enough to pull this off, Italy will be laser focused on the Med and I think it is too far for the Japanese. And while Brazil may be powerful enough, I'm guessing the US will not be comfortable with that. (And the US will be close to having Veto power) Mexico, OTOH might be allowed.
Treaty ports would depend on how irredentist the US is. I cant really see them not getting New Orleans outright if not some de facto way.
Treaty of Asuncion
"...British naval cutter that sailed from Montevideo to Buenos Aires flying the Naval Jack as well as the white flag of peace; Muller's presence in Buenos Aires was not publicized by the government for fear of unrest, though by evening on February 3rd the news that at least a Brazilian envoy of some kind was in the capital to request a ceasefire had spread and there was a mix of trepidation, excitement and anger, depending on one's political persuasions.
The war had strained and polarized Argentine society in some ways while uniting it in others, and Drago for better or worse was an independent president in every sense of the word. His pragmatism, humility and personal propriety during the hard years of tumult had endeared him to many Argentines who had feared that he would be a return to the pre-1890 oligarchy which he was still suspected of representing, but his nomination as an inoffensive compromise to prevent the Civic Union from tearing itself apart in 1910 meant that he was a President both with nobody to whom he owed any particular favors (especially as he was, after two and a half long, ugly years of war, looking forward to a quiet and peaceful retirement) yet also no natural political constituency save career diplomats at the Foreign Office who admired him. Conservatives reviled him as a puppet of Alem, while progressives found his moderation and disinterest in public policy alienating. Navigating the end of the war was thus, perhaps even more so than the prosecution of the war itself, the greatest challenge Drago had thus faced as he looked out over a country eager to end the fighting but also now with a blood feud against Brazil.
Thankfully, Drago's background as a talented diplomat lent itself well to the task ahead. The Muller peace mission had been arranged largely at the behest of the British Foreign Office to bring the fighting in Mesopotamia to an end, with fear in London high that the rapidly fraying situation in Brazil after the Revolt of the Recruits would end in a revolution and civil war not unlike the simmering three-sided conflict in neighboring Chile and that perhaps something similar could occur in Argentina, too. Drago was well aware that Britain, especially its beleaguered Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Malcolm, needed any kind of win to point to after the failures of the Niagara Conference and its co-effort with France to negotiate a conclusive end to fighting between the United States and Confederate States the previous summer, and to this effect when the British had communicated via their ambassador ahead of Muller's arrival he had already mapped out terms he would find agreeable. While many in his government, or the government's immediate supporters such as Alem himself, had not forgotten that Muller had spent most of the last two years traveling between European capitals trying to delay an intervention in order to maximize Brazil's hand, Drago accepted the offer of a negotiated settlement "that could satisfy both parties" and an agreement was made to order a ceasefire effective February 7th, even though no real fighting had occurred for months, especially not after the Revolt. Drago and his ambitious young foreign minister, Leopoldo Melo, would soon thereafter depart for the most suitable neutral site available to the two combatants to bury the hatchet and find what was hoped to be a lasting peace - Asuncion, capital of Paraguay..."
- The Radical Republic
"...site steeped in a certain deep historical symbolism, national mythology and, Drago drily noted in his comprehensive wartime diaries, more than a dash of irony. It had been an alliance between Argentina and Brazil that had come together to smash Paraguay in the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance that destroyed the small, landlocked nation and left it impoverished, demographically gutted and diplomatically isolated for decades to come. Being a conduit for trade during the Great American War, especially for goods traveling through Bolivia and Peru to Argentina prior to Chile's exit from the war a year earlier, had helped it begin the process of recovery, and under President Eduardo Schaerer who would leave office soon after the Peace of Asuncion had enjoyed peaceful domestic politics and coherent governing policies despite the chaos on either side of the country. That it would be Paraguay brokering as neutral party the treaty between Argentina and Brazil was thus a set of circumstances lost on no-one.
Eusebio Ayala, the Foreign Minister of Paraguay and Schaerer's close confidant, was one of the chief architects of the peace, which was to Brazil's chagrin. Schaerer's Liberal Party, known domestically as the Azules, may have been to the right of the Alemist regime in Buenos Aires but nonetheless viewed the Civic Union's domestic program as something of a blueprint, especially for delivering political peace, and there were few in Schaerer's orbit who did not have a strong preference bordering on open bias for Argentina's position (indeed, Ayala had been one of the most prominent Azules to support Schaerer's desire to remain neutral, against many who had hoped to enter the war on Argentina's side). Accordingly, correspondence between Buenos Aires and Asuncion before Muller's peace feelers had already established an unwavering baseline that over the ten day Congress which Ayala arbitrated came very close to the final peace terms.
Both countries were desperate to exit the war what with hungry and agitated populations that were actively starting to riot, sputtering economies, and more than anything a simple exhaustion from the bloodshed. Argentina had been tested many times along the Parana but had held out every time, and it was fair to say that they had fought the war to a draw that, considering their expulsion from Uruguay in the opening weeks of fighting and frantic retreat through Mesopotamia thereafter. Whatever Brazil had hoped to earn coming into the war was now surely out of its grasp, and the peace terms would reflect that, but also entrench the early gains made by Rio de Janeiro as simple facts on the ground.
Argentina, as a fait accompli, recognized the Saraiva government in Uruguay and "denounced as a diplomatic policy" any attempts by the exiled Colorados to reestablish themselves in Montevideo, dismaying many more radical Alemists such as Hipolito Yrigoyen who had come to view Jorge Batlle's cause as a profoundly just one and moderate Civic Unionists and Drago as sellouts for abandoning them. There was, simply, no way for Argentina to do anything else seeing as how they'd been ejected from Montevideo in October of 1913, and even Alem had long ago made peace with the fact that Uruguay's dominance by its Lusophone, Brazilophilic minority and by proxy Rio de Janeiro was the price to pay for an end to the war.
Beyond that, though, Brazil had little to show for two years of bloody and disproportionate losses along the Parana. Rather than the full demilitarization of the Mesopotamia that it had mooted offering Buenos Aires in early 1914 - terms that Drago would likely have accepted - were watered down to simply demilitarizing the Uruguay River as a neutral border between the two countries, meaning that after two years of occupying the land between it and the Parana, Brazil would have to evacuate and watch Argentine soldiers triumphantly march across land in peace that they had failed to reclaim in war. At Ayala's insistence, no indemnities were paid by either side to the other, and all pre-war economic and trade privileges were restored on both sides - Brazil did not even reserve the right to dictate Uruguay's tariff policy against Argentina or, more worryingly, Britain.
Argentine reactions to this peace agreement were mixed but, considering the vast territories stripped from Chile and Brazil's evacuation from Mesopotamia and photos of triumphant soldiers raising the Argentine flag over their sovereign territory again in the weeks that followed the Peace of Asuncion, the majority of the country's citizens, many of whom had been fed into the meat grinder along the Parana at some point and come back haunted and broken by the experience, it was as good a peace as they could have imagined in the dark days of the winter of 1913-14. The country's politics were darker and less optimistic than they had been before, now, but they had come through the worst of it with more territory in Patagonia and the whole of the Tierra del Fuego and, most importantly, had their land back. Ambitions in Uruguay would have to wait for another day..."
- War in the Cone
"...even as Fonseca's nationalists rioted alongside socialists, syndicalists of the newly-formed Sindicato Geral do Brasil, and often simply flustered and bored veterans who needed something to do other than rot at home with their grief and guilt. Though it was patently obvious that Brazil had no other path forward, even Dom Agosto Leopoldo commented icily to his cousin that, "This is a surrender without suffering a defeat." Brazil would leave the war with worse gains than they could have demanded two years earlier, meaning that, in the eyes of many Brazilians, the entirety of 1914 and 1915 had represented nearly two hundred thousand men killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded for essentially nothing. If Fonseca had not been a villain before, he certainly was one now, but many turned their attention just as much to the establishment that had enabled him for years and allowed him to press on with his "blood-stained vanity" to produce his much-desired triumph. Monarchist newspapers tried to trumpet the Peace of Asuncion as a victory in that it prevented Argentine warships from entering Brazilian waters and that Uruguay no longer represented a "radical periphery," to which the hard right and hard left together scoffed and dismissed such claims as trying to put an optimistic spin on A Vitoria Mutilada - the Mutilated Victory.
Brazil was, for the first time since September of 1913, at full peace with her neighbor. Domestically, she would not know the antebellum peace she had enjoyed again for quite some time..."
- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil
(Obviously a lot going on in these updates, but this brings us to the end of the war in the Cone, and leaves USA vs CSA as the last front/theater of war)
The war had strained and polarized Argentine society in some ways while uniting it in others, and Drago for better or worse was an independent president in every sense of the word. His pragmatism, humility and personal propriety during the hard years of tumult had endeared him to many Argentines who had feared that he would be a return to the pre-1890 oligarchy which he was still suspected of representing, but his nomination as an inoffensive compromise to prevent the Civic Union from tearing itself apart in 1910 meant that he was a President both with nobody to whom he owed any particular favors (especially as he was, after two and a half long, ugly years of war, looking forward to a quiet and peaceful retirement) yet also no natural political constituency save career diplomats at the Foreign Office who admired him. Conservatives reviled him as a puppet of Alem, while progressives found his moderation and disinterest in public policy alienating. Navigating the end of the war was thus, perhaps even more so than the prosecution of the war itself, the greatest challenge Drago had thus faced as he looked out over a country eager to end the fighting but also now with a blood feud against Brazil.
Thankfully, Drago's background as a talented diplomat lent itself well to the task ahead. The Muller peace mission had been arranged largely at the behest of the British Foreign Office to bring the fighting in Mesopotamia to an end, with fear in London high that the rapidly fraying situation in Brazil after the Revolt of the Recruits would end in a revolution and civil war not unlike the simmering three-sided conflict in neighboring Chile and that perhaps something similar could occur in Argentina, too. Drago was well aware that Britain, especially its beleaguered Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Malcolm, needed any kind of win to point to after the failures of the Niagara Conference and its co-effort with France to negotiate a conclusive end to fighting between the United States and Confederate States the previous summer, and to this effect when the British had communicated via their ambassador ahead of Muller's arrival he had already mapped out terms he would find agreeable. While many in his government, or the government's immediate supporters such as Alem himself, had not forgotten that Muller had spent most of the last two years traveling between European capitals trying to delay an intervention in order to maximize Brazil's hand, Drago accepted the offer of a negotiated settlement "that could satisfy both parties" and an agreement was made to order a ceasefire effective February 7th, even though no real fighting had occurred for months, especially not after the Revolt. Drago and his ambitious young foreign minister, Leopoldo Melo, would soon thereafter depart for the most suitable neutral site available to the two combatants to bury the hatchet and find what was hoped to be a lasting peace - Asuncion, capital of Paraguay..."
- The Radical Republic
"...site steeped in a certain deep historical symbolism, national mythology and, Drago drily noted in his comprehensive wartime diaries, more than a dash of irony. It had been an alliance between Argentina and Brazil that had come together to smash Paraguay in the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance that destroyed the small, landlocked nation and left it impoverished, demographically gutted and diplomatically isolated for decades to come. Being a conduit for trade during the Great American War, especially for goods traveling through Bolivia and Peru to Argentina prior to Chile's exit from the war a year earlier, had helped it begin the process of recovery, and under President Eduardo Schaerer who would leave office soon after the Peace of Asuncion had enjoyed peaceful domestic politics and coherent governing policies despite the chaos on either side of the country. That it would be Paraguay brokering as neutral party the treaty between Argentina and Brazil was thus a set of circumstances lost on no-one.
Eusebio Ayala, the Foreign Minister of Paraguay and Schaerer's close confidant, was one of the chief architects of the peace, which was to Brazil's chagrin. Schaerer's Liberal Party, known domestically as the Azules, may have been to the right of the Alemist regime in Buenos Aires but nonetheless viewed the Civic Union's domestic program as something of a blueprint, especially for delivering political peace, and there were few in Schaerer's orbit who did not have a strong preference bordering on open bias for Argentina's position (indeed, Ayala had been one of the most prominent Azules to support Schaerer's desire to remain neutral, against many who had hoped to enter the war on Argentina's side). Accordingly, correspondence between Buenos Aires and Asuncion before Muller's peace feelers had already established an unwavering baseline that over the ten day Congress which Ayala arbitrated came very close to the final peace terms.
Both countries were desperate to exit the war what with hungry and agitated populations that were actively starting to riot, sputtering economies, and more than anything a simple exhaustion from the bloodshed. Argentina had been tested many times along the Parana but had held out every time, and it was fair to say that they had fought the war to a draw that, considering their expulsion from Uruguay in the opening weeks of fighting and frantic retreat through Mesopotamia thereafter. Whatever Brazil had hoped to earn coming into the war was now surely out of its grasp, and the peace terms would reflect that, but also entrench the early gains made by Rio de Janeiro as simple facts on the ground.
Argentina, as a fait accompli, recognized the Saraiva government in Uruguay and "denounced as a diplomatic policy" any attempts by the exiled Colorados to reestablish themselves in Montevideo, dismaying many more radical Alemists such as Hipolito Yrigoyen who had come to view Jorge Batlle's cause as a profoundly just one and moderate Civic Unionists and Drago as sellouts for abandoning them. There was, simply, no way for Argentina to do anything else seeing as how they'd been ejected from Montevideo in October of 1913, and even Alem had long ago made peace with the fact that Uruguay's dominance by its Lusophone, Brazilophilic minority and by proxy Rio de Janeiro was the price to pay for an end to the war.
Beyond that, though, Brazil had little to show for two years of bloody and disproportionate losses along the Parana. Rather than the full demilitarization of the Mesopotamia that it had mooted offering Buenos Aires in early 1914 - terms that Drago would likely have accepted - were watered down to simply demilitarizing the Uruguay River as a neutral border between the two countries, meaning that after two years of occupying the land between it and the Parana, Brazil would have to evacuate and watch Argentine soldiers triumphantly march across land in peace that they had failed to reclaim in war. At Ayala's insistence, no indemnities were paid by either side to the other, and all pre-war economic and trade privileges were restored on both sides - Brazil did not even reserve the right to dictate Uruguay's tariff policy against Argentina or, more worryingly, Britain.
Argentine reactions to this peace agreement were mixed but, considering the vast territories stripped from Chile and Brazil's evacuation from Mesopotamia and photos of triumphant soldiers raising the Argentine flag over their sovereign territory again in the weeks that followed the Peace of Asuncion, the majority of the country's citizens, many of whom had been fed into the meat grinder along the Parana at some point and come back haunted and broken by the experience, it was as good a peace as they could have imagined in the dark days of the winter of 1913-14. The country's politics were darker and less optimistic than they had been before, now, but they had come through the worst of it with more territory in Patagonia and the whole of the Tierra del Fuego and, most importantly, had their land back. Ambitions in Uruguay would have to wait for another day..."
- War in the Cone
"...even as Fonseca's nationalists rioted alongside socialists, syndicalists of the newly-formed Sindicato Geral do Brasil, and often simply flustered and bored veterans who needed something to do other than rot at home with their grief and guilt. Though it was patently obvious that Brazil had no other path forward, even Dom Agosto Leopoldo commented icily to his cousin that, "This is a surrender without suffering a defeat." Brazil would leave the war with worse gains than they could have demanded two years earlier, meaning that, in the eyes of many Brazilians, the entirety of 1914 and 1915 had represented nearly two hundred thousand men killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded for essentially nothing. If Fonseca had not been a villain before, he certainly was one now, but many turned their attention just as much to the establishment that had enabled him for years and allowed him to press on with his "blood-stained vanity" to produce his much-desired triumph. Monarchist newspapers tried to trumpet the Peace of Asuncion as a victory in that it prevented Argentine warships from entering Brazilian waters and that Uruguay no longer represented a "radical periphery," to which the hard right and hard left together scoffed and dismissed such claims as trying to put an optimistic spin on A Vitoria Mutilada - the Mutilated Victory.
Brazil was, for the first time since September of 1913, at full peace with her neighbor. Domestically, she would not know the antebellum peace she had enjoyed again for quite some time..."
- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil
(Obviously a lot going on in these updates, but this brings us to the end of the war in the Cone, and leaves USA vs CSA as the last front/theater of war)
Will Argentina try to militarily support USA there?
Is Argentina even at war war with CSA?
Jorge Batlle is his descendant who was a Colorado president in the early 2000s. Jose Batlle is the name of the 1910s Colorado leader.
Also it appears we are now waiting on the arrival of Brazilian Mussolini. The Italian monarchy wasn't really gotten rid of by Mussolini until the Social Republic so I suppose by parallel this means Luis I is in the clear until the Integralists lose the entire south of the country and have to be bailed out by the French.
So damn, Brazil just gets a puppet nation to its south, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, and essentially no other gains. They must be pissed. I can easily imagine them wanting to go another round in future. Definitely seeing the parallels with post-WWI Italy, though I'm keen to see how closely that parallel aligns as time goes on.
In a hypothetical future war, what would Brazil even want? Taking Mesopotamia from Argentina, maybe fully annexing Uruguay, anything else? Or would it be less about territory and more about destroying the hated enemy?
In a hypothetical future war, what would Brazil even want? Taking Mesopotamia from Argentina, maybe fully annexing Uruguay, anything else? Or would it be less about territory and more about destroying the hated enemy?
- I presumed from another post that Mesopotamia got demilitarized, but it boils down to the equivalent of the Mexican Navy can't Patrol the Rio Grande. Functionally they could have gotten *that* two or three months into the war!
- It *also* leads to the possibility that Brazil may end up so chaotic (Brazilian Civil War?) that Argentina can simply walk into Uruguay. :evil grin:
- Is the United States at peace with Brazil? With the Brazilians pulling their army back from Argentina that probably makes any raids more costly, leaving simply putting the Brazilian Navy on the bottom of the ocean as a target. Yes, theoretically, Argentina having peace with Brazil means the Brazilians can move their entire navy north, but at this point the response of the US Navy to that would be *goodie, more targets*
- Is Argentina at peace with the Confederacy? Theoretically without any local fighting, they *could* send volunteer troops North. (as sort of a thank you for the troops the US sent south) *Maybe* it makes sense to have them serve in certain parts of Texas? Have the Argentines discovered any warfare techniques that might be useful against the CSA?
- I'm trying to figure out what the *second* choice for the site of Negotiations would be after Paraguay, Ecuador? Venezuela? Colombia? London?
- My *guess* is that the USN is still smaller than the British RN, but with *far* less of an area to patrol (So *possibly* with the advantage in the Atlantic???)
- Both Mexico and Brazil are ending up close to Status Ante Bellum, but for Mexico the result is largely relief and for Brazil fury.
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That's because Reyes did the opposite of what Fonseca did when an opportunity to cut his loses appear. Seriously, I'm still baffled by Olegario Molina, Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel trying to fight to the bitter end when they didn't have to.
Poor Uruguay. But that's what happens to small countries that are next to big countries.
You know I never quite got around to deciding this part, so presumably while the answer is likely yes, there's no real need for them to send anything other than volunteers northwards
Shoot yes that's who I meant. Family names and all...
Luis I's politics are also, per Wikipedia, a very, very soft version of integralism, so he may even be quite sympathetic to Salgado's POV
While I'm sure Brazil would love to have Mesopotamia, this is more what it boils down to, IMO.
My thinking with Mexico is that it quickly became the view both of the government and the grunts on the ground that they were being relied upon as cannon fodder for the CSA rather than having any strategic objectives of their own, whereas Brazil talked itself into the idea that the war was some holy crusade against godless (lol) Argentina
So far from God, so close to Brasil
1916 Argentine Presidential election
1916 Argentine Presidential election
The 1916 Argentine general election was an election held on April 2, 1916 to elect the President of the Republic and the Chamber of Deputies of Argentina; Luis Drago, an independent informally affiliated with the ruling Civic Union, was limited by law to only one lifetime six-year term in office. The vote was held less than two months after the end of the Great American War in South America and the Peace of Asuncion with Brazil, and thus focused heavily on the restoration of prewar Argentina's economic growth in a postwar setting.
Due to the end of the war and its dominance since 1890 of Argentina's political system, the ruling Civic Union (UC) was expected to waltz back into power, especially as the conservative opposition split into reactionary and reformist camps. However, the war had split opinions of activists within the UC on postwar policy, President Drago had not cultivated a base within the party which made his choosing of a successor likely to hold, and the eminence grise of Argentine politics, former two-time President Leandro Alem, was in declining health and thus unable to exercise the influence he once had over the party's more restive radical wing.
A major reason why Drago had been chosen in 1910 in the first place was not just to preserve Alem's power and influence but also to prevent a party split between Alem's chief deputy Francisco Barroetavena and his left-wing nephew Hipolito Yrigoyen; said split emerged in 1916, as Yrigoyen announced the formation of a Radical Party in late February with an appeal to the masses and returning soldiers after Barroetavena was selected as the UC's nominee thanks to Alem and Drago's backroom influence. The split in the UC benefitted the candidate of the liberal-conservative Democratic Progressive Party, Lisandro de la Torre, who despite coming in third performed better than any opposition candidate ever had; Barroetavena won the election, albeit extremely narrowly (his winning margin was approximately 1.6%), and Yrigoyen could credibly have been said to have been denied election thanks to the Socialist Party of Argentina siphoning off close to 9% of the national vote. The 1916 election was the last one in which the Civic Union not only won, but was a credible political force in its own right.
---
"...at first glance straightforward. Major Autonomists such as Roca or even Saenz Pena were dead, and De la Torre's choice to exit into his own party that accepted the settlement of 1890 and desired to act as a classically liberal party within those parameters essentially meant that the opposition was in tatters. The Civic Union had in many ways become as much an institution and organ of government as the Constitution or Congress, in Alem's view, and as he predicted that he would die within the year, he was content to see his party press on one last time. [1]
It would indeed be one last time, though. The Civic Union had indeed become a vehicle for Alem's ideology but it was also now a vehicle largely associated with Alem the man as much as the views he espoused. He had dominated government as President twice, and from behind the scenes during the terms of two other men, but the challenges exposed by the war and Drago's own tempered ambitions meant that the rift of 1910 had not gone away but merely been dormant for the past six years, and now the boundless energy of Yrigoyen was arrayed once more against the UC's establishment in Congress and in Cabinet. Alem cared for his nephew, deeply, but the shift of his party to be a big tent of the center that appealed "to every Argentine in every province" was threatened by Yrigoyen's very explicit aim to make the UC a party not of liberal-progressive reformism but rather of the left, promising a campaign of even more aggressive secularization of society and suggesting that he would consider a political alliance with the Socialists, presaging the Popular Front of future years. Alem's decision to spurn his nephew on account of "personalism" seems the height of hypocrisy considering how much the UC revolved around Alem's individual influence to the point of El Viejo often chose candidates by pointing at them, facetiously and derisively nicknamed "el dedazo", or "the finger." But he had very genuine concerns about Yrigoyen's ability to temper his ambitions and there was more than a dash of not wanting to see his life's project be undone by his brash nephew's new ideas. As such, it was Barroetavena, the favorite of Alem and most of the party, who received the nod in January of 1916 at the party congress in Buenos Aires. Yrigoyen and hundreds of his supporters walked out less than ten minutes later, and the Civic Union was irreparably broken forever.
That parties were not to campaign while the negotiations in Asuncion were ongoing was initially seen as an advantage to Barroetavena, but Yrigoyen was nonetheless holding meetings with union bosses, deputies, and provincial governors while the Cabinet remained in Buenos Aires managing the last days of the war, and as such he had a surprising amount of momentum behind his new "Radical Party" as the campaign kicked off in earnest in late February. It also helped that Yrigoyen was a spirited orator with as much energy as his uncle, and Alem - ailing from exhaustion after his pro-war campaigns over the last two years - threw himself into countering his nephew when Barroetavena's rote, dull speeches about continuing in the traditions of the party failed to inspire the populace. The 1916 elections thus turned into the last grand tour of Alem against the budding new force of Yrigoyen, and Barroetavena himself became practically an afterthought. Argentines by the thousands, especially tired veterans returning from the front, came out to see the Old Man one last time, and considering the narrowness of the results - and that Yrigoyen and the Socialists together won nearly forty percent of the vote - it can be said that Alem's dogged campaigning in damp autumn weather won Barroetavena the Presidency.
Yrigoyen never forgave his uncle, even on Alem's deathbed months later, and the efforts wound up being for naught. High on elation after the Peace of Asuncion, postwar economic troubles soon consumed Barroetavena's Presidency, and Argentines rapidly began to tire of "the family feud," as the Radical-Civic Union rivalry soon came to be known. De la Torre nearly did as well as Yrigoyen, suggesting that Argentine voters, especially the middle and upper classes, were open to a moderate alternative to the flailing big tent that had just torn itself in half. As thousands of men returned from the front to compete with immigrants and women for work and prices fluctuated rapidly up and down as the economy shifted haphazardly to peacetime, the placid, personalist politics of pre-war Argentina were forever gone as the reactionary oppositionists and, soon enough, Alem himself died out and the generation growing up in the shadow of the men who had taken to the Artillery Park in 1890 stepped out for their moment in the sun..."
- The Radical Republic [2]
[1] The Civic Union and Alemism definitely have some Vanguard Party tendencies here, yes
[2] Once I realized how early in 1916 this election was I wanted to make sure I got all my ideas down while they were fresh
I think the Canal was a Mexican Strategic objective at the beginning, but they gave up on that relatively quickly. And I'd love to see a breakout of Mexican Army casualties. How many died in pre-war CSA, how many died in pre-war USA, how many died on the home soil and how many died in Centro. I'm *guessing* from the description that "died in pre-war CSA" is more than half.
And now I don't feel so bad in terms of the confusion of Drag Race Brazil vs. Drag Race Brasil on Wikipedia.
A very clear showcase of how extreme personalism works and parties that begin to flail once their Dear Leader™ falters or dies.
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That question gets a bit murky considering how much Mexico expended on the Los Pasos theater specifically, where CSA and their soil came togetherI think the Canal was a Mexican Strategic objective at the beginning, but they gave up on that relatively quickly. And I'd love to see a breakout of Mexican Army casualties. How many died in pre-war CSA, how many died in pre-war USA, how many died on the home soil and how many died in Centro. I'm *guessing* from the description that "died in pre-war CSA" is more than half.
And now I don't feel so bad in terms of the confusion of Drag Race Brazil vs. Drag Race Brasil on Wikipedia.
Thanks! That’s def exactly what I was aiming for. We’ll get a Wikibox for Alem later that sums up his life, hopefully my approach with him made sense for setting up where Argentina is at
Good point. If Los Pasos is treated as all defense of the Home Soil, then things might be closer to equal.