This assignment you will create your perfect kingdom. Congratulations! You are about to become the leader of a fictional Latin American nation at some point during the Cold War (1945-1991). Discuss your role in the new nation, how you will organize or guide the country, and how you will deal with emerging problems.
You are not obligated to answer all of these questions, but here are some issues you might want to consider for inclusion and in deciding how you will structure your country:
When did you rise to power? What alliances will you make? What will be your foreign policy?
How did you come to power? Was it a military coup? Free elections? Rigged elections? How will this inform your decisions as the new leader?
From whom will you draw your support? Do you rule with an iron fist or do you share your power?
What kind of government is this? Democracy? Oligarchy? Dictatorship? Something else?
Is this a capitalist nation? Communist? Other?
How are you going to keep the internal opposition in check or prevent another change in power? Will you use secret police or the military to suppress them? Or will you rule as a popular leader that shares the wealth of the nation with the people? What kind of problems will you face as a result of these decisions? What about the national media?
What will you do about the economy? Will you industrialize? Harvest raw materials? Create a tourist industry? What will you do about labor unions?
How you deal with the influence of the church? Will you embrace it? Suppress it?
How will you deal with social issues such as womens rights, health care, alcohol/drugs, education, gambling, etc.?
Obviously there is no right answer for this assignment per se, but there can be wrong ones. For example, it would not make much sense if you created a communist nation that was allied with the United States during the Cold War or if you created an authoritarian military regime that ruthlessly suppressed protests, yet you expect tourism to be the main industry.
This will show your ability to incorporate specific (real) examples from Latin American history that will guide your decisions as well as your thoroughness in addressing and considering some of these issues. Your examples should come from the period after independence through today. Be sure that you explain the reasoning of your decisions through the lens of actual events and information from the textbook (and other sources). You can explain your decisions through either positive or negative examples from Latin American history. An example of the positive might be, I would take control of Stevetopia through guerrilla warfare and entrenching myself in the local mountains. This strategy worked very well for Fidel Castro in the late 1950s because he was able to capture Cuba with only 12 soldiers under his command (insert citation). An example of the negative might be, I would closely align myself economically and politically with the United States. Fidel Castros decision to stand against the U.S. during the Cold War led to several negative outcomes including. These are very basic examples, so you would obviously want to expand on these.
Just be sure that the paper is not mostly fiction and that you do tie your reasoning into actual examples.
The paper should not be a long stream of quotations or fictionalized back-story, but you should use carefully chosen examples to prove your argument convincingly. Your fictional story is not bound by the restraints of what has actually occurred at your fictional point in time. For example, you decide to create your setting in the late 1940s you can still use examples of why you would make a particular decision based on events that really occurred in the 1980s.