Mexico
From Turtledove
The United Mexican States or just know as Mexico is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico is a federation comprising thirty-one states and a federal district, the capital Mexico City, whose metropolitan area is one of the world's most populous.
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[edit] Mexico in Southern Victory
Mexico was an empire (at least, in the sense that its ruler called himself an emperor) that shared a border with the Confederate States. It was a minor member of the Entente.
In the 1860s, France established the Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, with support from the Roman Catholic clergy and conservative elements of the upper class as well as some indigenous communities.
The United States frowned upon this move, which was considered a gross interference by a European power in its spehere of influence contrary to the Monroe Doctrine. The survival of Maximilian in power and his abily to establish the Mexican Habsburg Dynasty was mainly due to the victory of the Confederacy in the War of Secession, which changed the startegic situation. The Confederacy itself had been able to secure its independence due to French (as well as British) support, and was perforce supportive of the French project in neighboring Mexico. Moreover, having an unpopular ruler in Mexico, needing Confederate help to survive, was well suited to serve the Confederate design of expanding westwards and gaining a foothold on the Pacific.
Despite resistance from within Maximilian and his dynasty were able to keep power, mainly thanks to Confederate and French support. Having been established for two decades and achieving sucessfully, after Maximilian's death, the transition to his successor, Maximilian II, the Mexican Habsburgs paid off their Confederate benefactors. Desperate for money, Maximilian II sold Sonora and Chihuahua to the Confederacy in 1881 for 3 million dollars, starting the Second Mexican War when the USA opposed this land exchange. Mexico's role during that war was limited to providing naval bases for French warships. Mexican nationalists were appalled at this further reduction of the their country's territory after the grave loss of nearly half Mexico's territory in the First Mexican War of the 1840's; however, the opposition to Habsburg rule had been throughly crushed in the previous two decades, its leaders dead, immprisoned or exiled, and was unable to raise any significant internal opposition inside Mexico.
The Mexican Empire under Francisco José I joined the Entente in the Great War, ironically placing the Mexican Habsburgs at the side of the enemies of the parent dynasty at Austria-Hungary; the Emperor might have been privately distressed about this but had little choice but to follow his French and Confederate sponsors. Mexican troops only fought in defense of Baja California - where, fighting on inhospitable soil they knew well, their determined resistance surprised and dismayed the invading US troops. The US quickly decided that the loss of life in a backwater was not worth it. The sucessful defence of Baja California helped salve Mexican national pride but after the war Mexico was forced to pay reparations to the winning Central Powers.
US President Theodore Roosevelt helped foment a rebellion against the empire shortly after the Great War ended in 1917. The Mexican Civil War continued until the mid-1920s. The battles around San Luis Potosi were notable for the semi-legal use of CS-made barrels. Thousands of CS veterans from both the Freedom Party and other organizations served as mercenaries for the Loyalist faction supporting the emperor, Maximilian III, while the Popular Revolutionaries withered and died from lack of effective US support. For the Confederates, involvement in the Mexican war served the double purpose of maintaining the status of Mexico as a Confederate satellite and trying out weapons and troops for the coming war with the US in a way impossible in Confederate territory due to the restrictions placed on the Confederacy in the 1917 Armistice. Among other things, it was in Mexico at this time that Jefferson Pinkard gained his first experience as the commandant of a prison camp.
The victory of the Mexican loyalists with the help of the Confederate Freedom Party gave an additional lease on life to the outworn rule of the semi-fuedal great landowners in the Mexican countryside, strongly resented by the exploited peasants. Ironically, once it cane to power the Freedom Party undertook, in the annexed Sonora and Chihuahua, a diametrically opposite policy of mobilizing the peasants against the landowners and thus built itself a strong popular base of support in the Hispanic areas of the Confederacy.
In 1941 Mexico joined the Second Great War by declaring war upon the Central Powers, although little if any fighting occured between US and Mexican forces during the first year. Confederate president Jake Featherston persuaded Emperor Francisco II to provide the Veracruz Division and two other divisions for CS use during its offensive against Pittsburgh, Operation Coalscuttle in 1942; these formations were destroyed by the counter-offensive led by General Irving Morrell. Afterwards, Featherston extorted five more Mexican divisions from Jose Francisco, this time for use against Negro partisans.
At the same time thousands of unemployed Mexicans were permitted to immigrate to the CSA doing menial jobs formerly held by Negroes. This was part of the Freedom Party's plan to rid the CSA of its black residents while ensuring that whites didn't have to do 'nigger work' themselves. The threat of deporting newly employed Mexicans back home to make trouble was a useful diplomatic tool for President Featherston.
The Mexican army during both wars wore yellowish-khaki that was well suited to Mexico's northern deserts, though it was less useful in Pennsylvania. During the Second Great War, Mexican troops were ill-supplied with machine guns, barrels and artillery, though at least each man had a rifle. They proved courageous enough and valuable in holding quiet sectors, but were unable to stand up to US offensives. Moreover, in this war they were unable to hold on to Baja California, where the combined US naval and land offensive was far more determined than in the previous war.
The Mexican military role in the war was thus very minor. However, Mexico's role in implemeting the murderous Population Reduction of the blacks was major and indispensable - both in the aformentioned providing of Mexican mirant workers to replace the Blacks in menial jobs - without which white Confederates might have objected, even on purely utilitarian grounds, to the arrest and killing of all Blacks - and by having Mexican troops comb the Confederate countryside and systematicaly destroy the Black sharecropper communities, sending their members to be gassed to death - a task for which Featherston could not spare the Confederacy's own troops, desperately needed at the front.
Although very much a junior partner in the alliance, Francisco Jose was one of the few Entente heads of state to survive the war without being killed or overthrown. In principle, he personally and the main political and military figures of his regime could have been tried on charges of being acessories to Crimes Against Humanity, for which at least as much damming evidence could have been brought as that which led Saul Goldman to the gallows. Taking such a step would, however, have severely destabilized Mexico, re-ignited the civil war and/or necessitated a direct US occupation of the country. With its forces already overextended in Canada and Utah as well as the Confederate territories the US chose to overlook the Mexican ruler's involvement in the mass murder of the Blacks - and the Emperor, for his part, was all too happy to be as subservient to the new masters as he had been to the old ones.
[edit] Mexico in The Two Georges
Mexico was a province of Spanish Nueva España. It lay to the south of the three provinces that bordered the North American Union. To the east was the province of Yucatan and to the south the province of Guatemala.
[edit] Mexico in Worldwar
Mexico was conquered by the Race in 1942. It was the only Race holding which shared a border with the United States. Launching an invasion of the US from Mexico would not have been an easy task as the front would expand as the invader advanced.
Ginger smuggling was common in Mexico.
When the Colonization Fleet arrived in the 1960s, it introduced plant and animal life native to Home to Mexico. Some of these plants and animals migrated north of the border into the southwestern US. The Race largely ignored the US's complaints.
By that time, rule by the race was well-established enough in Mexico that much of border contols and other routine police matters were entrusted to humans in the Race's service.
[edit] Mexico in The Disunited States of America
Mexico followed the United States pattern of independence and dissolution into several countries. The region was still referred to as the "Mexican states".
[edit] Mexico in "Secret Names"
Makykano was a region in Mexico and the west and south part of the former state of Texas where clans of hunter-gathers resided some two hundred years after the world wide calamity called the Big Oops. To the north and east were the tribes of the Eestexas region with which the Makykanoes would on occasion trade and on others war.
