I have no idea why I got a bug up my butt to write all of this out.
…
Empire Imposed
Brazil’s occupation of Argentina in 2075 is generally not considered part of the Consolidation Wars. It was instead a humanitarian intervention, at least at first. An Argentinian xeno-research facility examining what appeared to be Amalgamation artificial intelligence technology did… something. Whatever it was managed to utterly crash the country’s entire datagrid in an almost literal instant, coming perilously close to breaking out into the wider world. In the process it managed to kill ten percent of the population outright, and sending the remainder of Argentina into a preindustrial state. It was only through Herculean efforts that Brazil was able to keep the Argentinian population alive long enough to get the lights back on.
Argentinian gratitude lasted an entire year, until it was clear that while Brazil had been eager to arrive, they had no intention of leaving. The intervention had been expensive, and Argentina had many valuable mineral resources, and there was a need to make sure that the AI crash did not happen again… the Brazilian government announced in 2077 that the occupation would be indefinite. A dozen small insurgencies started the next day.
Six years later, the Brazilians were still dealing with a restive Argentina. Brazil had not been a repressive overlord, except in areas where there were active rebels. Even there the government took prisoners and distinguished between insurgents, and terrorists. If there had still been objective observers at the time, they would have predicted that at some point the fighting would have died down, particularly if some arrangement was reached that made Argentina at least partially sovereign again. All the two countries needed was a bit of calm.
Instead, they got the Guianan Atrocities.
West Europe’s invasion of Colombia, Venezuela, and Surinam — with the kind of mass civilian deaths now unfortunately associated with Eurasian and African conflicts — galvanized both the old United States of America and Brazil into rapidly expanding their territories. In the north, the USA engaged in diplomacy (for what would turn out to be distinctly unsavory reasons); in the South, Brazil simply decided to grab as much territory as it could before the West Europeans did.
Brazil succeeded, because it had enough of an orbital KEW presence to make West Europe thoughtful. For that matter, the USA had rather more of one, and an interest in not letting the Europeans take over another continent. In 2085 Brazil traded some extremely unpopulated territory in its far north to West Europe in exchange for the understanding that everything — and everyone — below a certain line of latitude was Brazil’s affair, and nobody else’s. The newly-minted USNA stood as guarantor to the deal, piously reanimating a Monroe Doctrine that had long since gone past ‘dead’ and was now ‘zombified.’
It took Brazil almost twenty years to first actually conquer the countries it had been given by the other Great Powers, and then pacify them. The mountainous nations of the western coast put up more of a fight than the easterners, but the threat of Brazil’s own KEW stocks kept insurgencies under some semblance of control. That left only conventional military forces, and Brasil was simply too strong there, too. The nation of Chile held out the longest, finally falling to Brazilian forces in 2096 after a brutal four year campaign. To this day it is estimated that outworld transportees of Chilean descent outnumber Chileans from actual Chile by five to one.
The formal recognition in 2102 of Grande Brasil as a Great Power was taken by later historians as the ‘official’ end of the Consolidation Wars. In reality, it was another decade before the rest of South America fully accepted their fates. It would take even longer for some of them to accept that whatever their future was, it would be spoken of in Portuguese…
