The CRC

Early on, I realized that on the map, ca. 1930, there was an enormous empty space with the words "South America" scratched out and replaced with "Cabralia." Given that nature, and alternate history, abhors a vacuum, I set out to fill it in with... what, exactly?

Cabralia is obviously going to be in there somewhere (a *Bonapartist empire, because the Empire of Brazil already exists, and it's called the UCNA.) But since Brazil is always the dominant power of alt-South America (because it's the biggest, see, and that means it's the most important), and I wanted something different, there's also going to be Gran Peru, the awesome republic that could. But that still leaves the entire Southern Cone unaccounted for.

So, from early on, I created the CRC, which I've been remiss in ignoring up to this point.

What the CRC stands for...

Truth be told, I'm not sure what CRC stands for. Officially, it's something like Conselho das Repúblicas da Cabralia, "Council of the Republics of Cabralia," or maybe o cabralina republicano Conselho, "the Cabralian Republican Council." There's no shortage of three-letter acronyms.

In practice, the joke is that it's something like Cabralina regimes caudilhista, "the Caudillo States of Cabralia." Any stereotype about Latin American government - plagued with juntas, lots of presidentes directors with spiffy uniforms and epaulets and an average life expectancy of 18 months from being sworn into office - is true of most CRC member states. A lot of them are prone to popular-democratic invective, especially against Cabralian perfidy, but as a rule it's honored in the breach; if and when an international human rights organization kicks off in Andalusada, most of the CRC member states will be on its shitlist for a long time.

...and what it is

Nation-states are a bit weaker in Andalusada. At the end of the Thirty Years' Hanseatic War, there was no Treaty of Westphalia, and the consequences of that not happening butterfly down through the centuries to the present day. This is my excuse to play with political systems that weren't hugely successful or prominent IRL; it's also my excuse, because it's fun, to Balkanize the world a little bit.

The flip side of that, though, is that state consolidation isn't the only kind there is. Economics of scale still exist, and if world politics don't support those scales being achieved naturally, it's definitely in people's interests to create them artificially. States may be weak, but a bloc can be strong - and the CRC, equal parts NATO and UEMOA, is the most infamous bloc of all. It's a textbook example of applied steampunk social science.

At the core of the CRC is the Triple Alliance: Balthasaria, Patagonia, and Paraguey, who form the front line of the conflicts with both Imperial Brazil and all the CRC's smaller members. Yes, you read that right: conflicts with its members. The Triple Alliance was sworn to death, and Patagonia in particular is not above overthrowing smaller states that, for whatever reason, try to escape its orbit. Where the Triple Alliance becomes more than an anti-Cabralian triumvirate was in the novelties they forced on their neighbors:

• A customs union, the single oldest and most foundational part of the CRC. (The establishment of this also triggered a lot of wars between Patagonia and the city-states of what we'd call Chile.) The concern was that foreign powers would exploit the region's many unstable economies to crush them all; a unified external tariff law stopped those worries forever, giving the entire region a fair bit of collective bargaining power.
• Common maritime trade laws. Until the completion of the Mexican Canal, all merchant marines had to sail through the Southern Cone's waters. Standardizing those laws gave them a great deal of collective bargaining power, which even trickled down to the Andean states.
• A common military standard. In the beginning, this was established between the Triple Alliance, but preferential dealing (and the fact that they've all seized a lot of guns from each other in various squabbles) made it an official thing. All nations in the CRC are part of the CRC's munitions bloc (entirely conformable to this year's ACP catalog), allowing them (in theory) to more easily and cheaply pose a united front against Cabralian aggression. (That it also makes the squabbling between the smaller members bloodier is a feature, not a bug.)
• The CRC's dogmatic military standard has paid off in another respect: being monolithic established it on the global market. A lot of places have adopted CRC hardware, enough to provide an international market for them to both buy and sell.
• Most recently, the Triple Alliance has established a currency union. This actually isn't a universal feature of the CRC just yet; while the Triple Alliance and a number of their more blatant puppet regimes all share it, some of the more independent or perennially unstable ones still issue their own currencies. (The CRC has better things to do than provoke a civil war because some presidente debases his money, gives the CRC dinheiro a bad name, and has to be taught a lesson.)

At its height in the late 1800s, the CRC was probably the single most powerful force in Cabralia. Its militaries were first-rate, and (because it controlled most of the phosphates of the guano mines) it was well-supplied, and the rest of the world had to hold their noses and deal with them on their terms. The march of technology hasn't been kind to them; now that the Mexican Canal is complete there's a lot less maritime traffic passing through, and those phosphates are considerably less expensive now that they can be extracted from oxygen.