No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

A dystopian Chile-Wank, and an upgraded version of one of the first maps I made.

In this world, Augusto Pinochet drank too much of his own kool-aid under the guidance of the Chicago Boys, and instead of a regular military rule, he envisioned a third path modelled after his idea of what Chile should look like. Under the tenets of Capitalismo Nacional, a totally deregulated economy, he argued, doesn't loosen the grip of the state over society, but to the contrary, it empowers the state in its defense of national values and against subversion. A Minarchist economy coupled to a quite Maxarchist repression apparatus was the way to follow. And Chile would lead the way. Soon, the Operación Condor, under the acquiescence of the United States, became much more -a definite military and economic alliance that would expand to the Colonels' regime in Greece, and in the subsequent years, to the general Milans regime that had aborted the Spanish transition. Many tinpot regimes around the world would follow in the 80's and 90s.

Action was followed by reaction. Communist guerrillas formed and gained momentum against what was perceived as a new, more aggressive stage of American imperialism in the Americas, and Liberation Theology became a much bigger thing in this world. Peru, South Africa, Central America, Colombia and Brazil became ravaged by war, as it was central Africa, where constant warfare coupled with a famine in the early 80's resulted in a UN board  intervening in those places where the state had by all accounts disappeared. From the South African chaos, two totalitarian regimes, a white supremacist and a black supremacist one, would emerge and engage in a mortal game around who gets nukes first. Guess which one has set death camps, and which one prefers public impalements. The right answer is it doesn't matter. 

The unstabilty in Central America would see the emergence of factions that played outside the bloc politics, such as the Social Autonomous Zapatista Army, a self styled Indigenist left-libertarian commune, in practice an army with(out) a state. Similarily, the African unstability gave momentum to the Panafricanist ideals of Gaddafi: his nuclear-armed Jamahiriya is a major concern. The Gang of Four would win the Game of Thrones in China, which would become the paramount leader of Communism when the USSR died in a coup and was replaced by Limonov's Totalitarian New Russia: its Eurasianist discourse comes in stark contrast with the fact it has totally withdrawn from outer affairs, its ever more ruined systems unable to cope with a world where it has lost all friends. Saudi Arabia eventually abandoned the special relations with the United states, being more than happy to sell to the highest bidder and in their currency of choice, exerting its pressure as an energetic power to the fullest: the USD is a much weaker and unstable currency ITTL. Japan and India, increasingly rife with domestic struggles as they are, have seen the world and want none of it. There has been a second Western Schism, and three popes (there are many more, but they are only recognized by their small sects) sit respectively in Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Recife.

With all this insanity around them, the Americans would become even less scrupulous when choosing friends. But this would change. First, the government crisis that followed the chaotic 1992 American elections was followed by lootings, survivalist guerrillas and rumors of a coup and a possible civil war. The compromise that saved the situation included the formation of the Autonomous Republics of Montana and Colorado: two survivalist, paramilitary regimes with a hard-on for Pinochet. Second and no least, a senile Pinochet would turn his back on the USA in 1998, claiming the decadent semi-capitalist democracies reeked of Communism and were the way of yesterday. By then, he could back his words with nuclear weapons. To see something positive about this, Neoliberalism has been thoroughly discredited between the main democratic powers, and now their interventions and alliances, while still driven by economic and geopolitical interests, are significantly more committed to democracy with a capital D (then again, this hasn't made a noticeable difference outside Sudan and Eritrea). But that's how the mainstream politics operate there, and they're extremely fragile. A good slice of the left-wing cake is now committed to Marxism-Leninism fitered through the thought of Mao, and an equally big slice of the right-wing cake thinks of Pinochet as a civil saint. And to his credit, maybe he was right. Maybe democracy is weak and is doomed to disappear.