Editing Latinoamerica

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Latinoamerica, America Latina or the rest-of-the-american-continent-that-is-not-USA-or-Canada is a region of the world located in the southern section of the american continent, as other parts of the world this land has given their share of unique features and content to the cultural multiverse most of /tg/ guys dream about. As we are not Wikipedia and we never wanted to be anyway we will focus in those aspects we really care, namely their contribution to anything fantastic or scifi-related.

==How it came to be: A most excelente historia of the continent for caballeros elegantes==

===Prehistory===

Historians still discuss how America came to be populated, while some claim this was done through the Bering Strait back in the Ice Age working as a natural land bridge due the ocean freezing, others postulate the idea some tribes jumped from island to island across Oceania and then crossing the Pacific Ocean. There is solid evidence for migration down through Alaska when the glaciers cleared around 16,000 years ago with humans reaching the tip of Tierre del Fuego by 14,000. The thing is that 5000 years ago there was already signs of early cultures and proto-civilizations in the southern part of America. The transition from hunter-gatherers seemed to have earned momentum as these tribes stablished themselves across the land, with some learning the basics of construction, pottery and weaving.

===The early Precolumbian Era===

As populations grew thanks to new agrarian techniques soon civilization started to emerge, let never GeeDubs fool you, that shit about humanity regressing due being stuck into some backwater planet runs against historical evidence if the American continent is any indication, while they never achieved the technological level of development of Eurasia until the Conquista imported it at gun point there was evident progress in most human activities, although hindered by the fact of living in a continent with little flat terrain, lots of mountain chains and jungles.

As early as 3000 BC you could find some cultures managing some decent feats of architecture such as religious citadels and temples to help themselves with astronomic calculations and the appeasing of the local deities.

Close to the beginning of the Common Age you could find the Mesoamericans have already invented a writing system based on glyphs, while in the southern regions commercial networks and advances in irrigation allowed for the local economy to thrive, as the centuries moved on new cultural iterations brought larger structures, better pottery, new crops and improvements in metal and stone workings

===Age of Empires===

By the Middle Ages some ethnic groups such as the Aztecs and the Incas have decided that theirs was (of course) the right way how things had to be done and began a process of building up empires, and all assorted activities such as road building, a better trained bureucracy, breakthroughs in mathemics and of course some ethnic cleansing and genocide to those who wouldn't agree (what, you really thought Europeans were the only ones doing these sort of things?).

In the North the great city of Tenochtitlan had grown upon the lake Texcoco, boasting a population of tens of thousands, from this supremely defensible position the Aztecs ensured the domain of tens of tribes and towns, promoting commerce, law peace and a bit of human sacrifice unless the Sun may die out. In the South the Incas conquered or convinced to join the Tawantinsuyo most of the Andean and coastal civilizations present in the region, they hold the record of achieving all of this without having invented the wheel or advanced in metallurgy beyond copper and gold, the guile historian points out this was simply because attempting to use carts in mountain terrain or exploit iron in a region where it wasn't easy to get it was simply impractical so they had to work around these problems.

Meanwhile the Mayans kingdoms continued their development, with written records showing a rather convoluted chronicle of kings waging wars among them and attempting to one up each other, this and the draining of natural resources resulted in a temporal decline which forced people out of some of the cities although civilization still held.

Beyond the Big Three tens of local cultures across the continent each made their own lives, sometimes waging tribal wars against each other, sometimes trading and sharing technologies and overall doing what humans do with all this "getting civilize" business.

By the fifteenth century things were going well, population was growing, roads were being built and commerce may soon ensure the local kickstart of the Iron Age, sure, both empires and the kingdoms had the occasional civil war, failed military operations, uprisings due some people not being quite happy about being taxed and forced to work for someone else, relocated from their lands or, in the case of the Aztecs, being sacrificed to some ferocious deity and so on, still, nothing extraordinary, in fact, quite similar to Antiquity in the Old World, then suddenly some very weird foreigners popped up from beyond the sea...

===La Conquista===

The European explorers, attempting to find an alternative route to India and China now that the Ottomans had blocked the Silk Road found the [[Lizardmen|Aztecs, Mayans and Incans]], soon news went to the Old World, with Spain and Portugal taking the lead and expeditions were armed to reclaim these new lands for God and King, soon hilarity ensued (if you are the kind who like very bleak humour).

While small, the average spaniard band was steel-armoured and armed, they got magic-like firearms, warhounds, horses and the utter belief in the righteousness of their cause against the "devil worshipers" while knowing all too well their opponents were just humans, the natives on the other hand had next to no armour, only wood, cooper and stone weapons, stone-copper age arrows, no battle animals and in some instances they weren't sure what sort of creatures the spaniards were, sometimes even mistaking them for gods or ghost (they eventually noticed they were humans because, as their said "their shit smells like ours", also terrible body odour), also, they really didn't have any trick to impress the Europeans with.

By the way, it's important to explain something here, while the Spaniard conquistadores were brutal and inhuman in the process of conquests, in most cases toppling entire realms and killing entire tribes, they never intended to exterminate the native population, if at least because becoming the owner of your own patch of land and native tribe of labourers was a huge social leap (most of the colonists were indeed poor people looking for a chance of social advancement) and the spaniards crown wanted subjects to fuel their quickly decaying realm while the Church officially wanted everyone saved from heathenism and treated fairly (for medieval catholic standards). Most of the decimation was done by the diseases the Europeans have brought with them (yes, the spaniards where basically the [[Death Guard]] thanks to their weapons, diseases and terrible lack of hygiene).

Not to say the natives were exactly the good guys, to begin with, chronicles reveal many, too many, tribes, local lords and small kingdoms decided to throw in their lot with the Spaniards, wait Anon, were these civilizations at peace with nature, some proto-socialist utopias were everyone was happy and what not? Eh, no, not really, this is something which needs to be drilled into western heads with an Aztec ceremonial knife, for the most part these civilization had been built on violence and political abuse (they are empires, after all, the classic ones), and while there was organized exploitation so people could get roads and reserves for hard times and safe commerce it was, well, exploitation, with many seeing the Spaniards as the opportunity to get rid of the local opressors.

The continent plummeted into a brutal war where the Europeans backed up by tens of thousands of rebels fought for nearly half a century against the local regional kingdoms and their vassals while the continent's population were ravaged by smallpox and other diseases brought from Eurasia, the entire clusterfuck is calculated to have costed up to 90 percent of the native population, so yeah, no one like a native american will tell you what is to live the Apocalypse.

Ultimately and after scoring some vital victories the Spaniards preferred to simply take over the current system, building up over the remains of the defeated civilizations and "christening" many customs, keeping some of the nobility and wealthy classes and letting them to their own benefits and devices as long as they didn't deny the supremacy of the Spaniard ruling class, this was in fact an usual modus-operandi for catholic missionaries and conquerors, who, like their 40k Imperial counterparts, took advantage of the beliefs and culture of the conquered to make things easier, [[Imperial Cult|the resulting process brought a unique mix were men praised the Christ yet held to the old traditions of spirits and local supernatural beings while slowly being introduced to European technology and culture.]]

===La Colonia===

So, you are a Conquistador Español and has managed to get into your pocket the rights for a small town of natives with their surrounding lands, what do? What indeed get a Cura so he could marry you with the most important local woman and start teaching your new subjects the ways of catholicism and civilization.

In time more and more Europeans started arriving into the New World, sometimes nobility with their respective spouses, sometimes just second sons of impoverished hidalgos, with many mixing with the local natives and creating different castes based on the degree of European or local blood and the usual discrimination laws which come with these sort of things and the resulting social unrest, meanwhile the local governors, now chosen by the Crown, started expanding over the old native cities or just made new ones whenever they found good conditions, soon the population started to recover as the Vicerroy often reserved for the government the right to brutalize the subjects and tribal and ethnic warfare was seeing as counterproductive.

From an economic and political point of view the american colonies were both a blessing and a curse to the old monarchies of Spain and Portugal, while they had massive resources available and their own respective markets they became dependent on the influx of resources from the colonies, gold in particular, producing an inflation which eventually broke their economic capabilities, this, combined with the simple fact none of them could make a positive accounting balance (fighting the protestants and ottomans took incredible amount of resources) eventually weakened the grip of the european countries in such way that when the ideas of democracy and independence entered the new continent it was a death sentence for the colonial dominions, and if that sounds like the roman empire, or certain futuristic Imperium, that's because that's how empires collapse.

As Spain suffered from social unrest and foreign invasion (oh the irony) the colonies saw uprisings from native populations tired of getting exploited, it really didn't end that well for them as often division was the norm of the day and without the support of the descendants of the Europeans they were missing both in terms of logistics and capital, but then in the North and Europe, a new idea took hold.

===El Día de la Independence===

First off, let's be absolutely honest here, los Proceres de la Independencia were more interested into getting rid of the vicerroy and Spaniard taxation in order to become the new masters of the continent than to bring democracy to the masses, combine this with the locals taking so many of Spain's bad practices and you got a ticket for and inestable and unfair "Republic", while the Proceres managed to fight admirably awell gainst the Spaniards and eventually forced them out of the region they often fell soon enough into conflict with each other, to the point most Latinoamerican nations went to both civil and external war against each other.

The Wars of Independence often started in the "lesser" colonies, with the local warlord gathering momentum due regional support and eventually achieving a critical mass of men and supplies to went into a direct confrontation with the Motherland armies, as they gathered momentum it came to a point where the Europeans often left territories without fighting which in turn gave the rebels more resources. 

===Let's try this thing named democracia, no wait some dictatorship would be good!===

As any child, Latinoamerica inherited a lot of things from the Iberian peninsula, on one hand their love for good cuisine, arts, letters and music, their savoir vivre and quite a west-style moderation when it came to war and laws (why we shall kill the enemy when they can work for us as loyal subjects?). On the other hand the utter economic incompetence, political short-sights and [[Adeptus Mechanicus|lack of technological innovation]], [[Administratum|the ridiculously overextended bureaucracy]] and regional fractiousness of the Habsburgs and amerindian rulers was evident from inception, with civil war, regional conflicts and unstable governance crippling most chances for progress.


==Latin Cultura and whatnot==

From a racial point of view Latinoamerica is the result of the native survivors of the invasions and many groups of inmigrants from different parts of the world. The spaniards and portuguese, like the rest of the europeans, saw the natives as savages and pagans to be converted to catholicism and used as servants, but ultimately many of them formed their own families with the amerindians because, well, why not? It becomes hard to be a bigot with someone you share the bed and roof with. This fact accounts to why, unlike in North America, most of Latinoamerica's inhabitants have a great share of native blood. However, social structures formed by the conquerors and inherited by the nascent latinoamerican republics discriminated the majority of the population, ensuring up to quite recently that most of the money and political power stayed in hands of pure-blood europeans. Or at least that was on paper, in practice, aside from the higher echelons, if you were industrious and sly enough you could bribe the authorities so they overlook your native ancestors, and in many communities there weren't enough criollos (descendants of europeans) to run things.

Eventually the vision of native blood as inferior and something to be shamed of has been changing into a sign of pride and defiance, with people [[Luna Wolves|declaring in a challenging tone]] they are of indian ancestry and what-ya-gonna-do, although nowadays racism still exists ([[derp|both ways, as people of amerindian origins have their own prejudices and ideas against other racial groups]]), it has become highly discredited, with Latinoamerican nations having CEOs, generals and presidents of mixed, non-european inmigrant or native ascendancy, [[derp|often as incompetent and corrupt as their white european predecessors and counterparts]].

While often you only see europeans and natives in most representations of Latinoamerica the region actually has large populations of african and asian populations, which mixed too with the former groups, resulting in a panoplia of mixtures which would produce and embolia to any racial purist. Ultimately all of these groups added their own cultural components, usually in the form of gastronomical and musical expressions which have become essential to the identity of their adopted countries.

to be continued...