Recently I acquired and read Argentina’s sole piece of counterfactual history literature, Marcos Victoria’s 1967
Buenos Ayres City: una Ucronía.
The first is a parodic take on Graham Greene and some of the more fanciful fantasies reactionaries had about what Argentina should have been, either as an English rather than a Spanish colony, or as a proper free market economy.
PoD is of course set during the English Invasions of 1806-07, and in this world it was the second one that took, turning poor backwards Argentina into the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata/Viceroyalty of the Silver River, an economic superpower with 50 million inhabitants and Britain’s last colony, a super Hong Kong of sorts that, in spite of being the best country in the world with statistics that’d make Switzerland cry with envy, is on the verge of revolution.
Indeed, while the power of the Free Market and Protestant Work Ethics (and properly white immigrants) have created a super utopia, the country’s still ripe for conspiracy and revolution, besieged by domestic conspirators and a ridiculous Legitimate Government in Exile, a parody of a Banana Republic set in the Malvinas in 1940 (same year the Chileans used to pilfer Tierra del Fuego from the British, because you need treacherous Chileans somewhere) used as a smokescreen by the real conspiracy. That the author, writing in 1967, would have accidentally predicted a May of 68 Insurrection but gotten the country wrong is of course one of those funny coincidences one couldn’t help but chuckle at.
In any case, our protagonist/narrator, a nosy and obtuse American journalist sent to report on the situation, meet colorful side-characters and try to get a boring romantic subplot started, gets kicked out of the country before the revolution starts, so that plot points is left hanging, although in any case the plot itself is an excuse to explore this world and get a laugh or two.
For one, everyone speaks a weird form of broken English that’s half a Spanish sentence and half an English sentence, while at the same time using proper English as the official language and Spanish as a private one. Places are of course renamed in terribly literal fashion, and I have to wonder how much was intentional given the parodic bent of the work (Mar del Plata, Tigre, Flores and La Plata become Silver Sea, Tiger, Flowers and Silver City, for instance, while the city and province of Buenos Aires become Buenos Ayres City and New Scotland, respectively). At least it avoids some other egregious ones (Julio A. Roca becomes Jules de la Rocque rather than Julius Rock, as I’ve seen done in online AH covering the same POD and subject)
Argentineans are as arrogant as in real life, except this world gives them cause for it, what with its country specifically designed to be the opposite of the real one, from its thriving economy to first class education to clean streets to quiet peaceful nights with no drunks roaming the streets and excellent utility services which even have the president of the phone company show up in person to apologize if you happen to have bad reception. And of course, no mention of Football, despite it being an English cultural import. I do wonder if that one was deliberate or an oversight.