Verdeguay

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República del Verdeguay Republic of Verdeguay
Flag	Coat of arms
Motto "Paz, Armonía y Libertad" (Spanish) "Peace, Harmony, and Liberty"
Anthem ¡Independencia o Muerte! (Independence or Death!)
National seal Gran Sello del Estado "Great Seal of the State"
Capital (and largest city)	Ciudad Rodríguez López
Official languages	Spanish
Demonym	Verdeguayan
State religion	Roman Catholic Church
Government  - President	Presidential republic Andrés Montesinos Geyer
Legislature  - Upper house  - Lower house	National Congress Chamber of Senators Chamber of Deputies
Independence  - from Spain	August 11, 1817
Area  - Total  - Water (%)	488,102 km² 0.88
Population  - 2009 estimate  - Density	10,490,037 21.49/km²
GDP (PPP)  - Total  - Per capita	2009 estimate $38.69 billion $3,689
GDP (nominal)  - Total  - Per capita	2009 estimate $39.61 billion $3,776
Gini (2009)	67.8 (high)
HDI (2009)	0.697 (medium)
Currency	Verdeguayanan peso ($) (VER)
Internet TLD	.vr
Calling code	55

The Republic of Verdeguay (Spanish: República del Verdeguay) is a small, sparsely populated, developing, landlocked nation located in Tarquinia. It is bordered by Santheres to the northeast and by Falsonia to the south. Verdeguay is one of the most isolated countries in the world; for most of its history, its borders were tightly controlled, trade with other countries was kept to a bare minimum, diplomatic contacts were few, and very little immigration was permitted. The result was a highly xenophobic, underdeveloped country that nevertheless was highly homogeneous and managed to keep its culture largely intact. Recently, the country has begun gradually and cautiously opening itself up to the outside world. How the country's prospects will fare as a result remains to be seen.

[edit] History

The country was a relatively undeveloped, neglected backwater colony of the Spanish from the early 1600s (the exact date of its colonization remains disputed, due to the fact that all archives and records from this period are lost) until 1817 when, after a brief but tumultuous war, the country won its independence. Unfortunately, the leader of the country's independence movement, Francisco Carlos Mauricio Rodríguez López, quickly forfeited the adulation of his people when, just days after the first Constitution - which was very liberal and progressive for its time - was finished, he dissolved the legislature, proclaimed himself President for Life, and instituted a reign of terror that lasted until his assassination in 1836. His autarkic economic policy and isolationist foreign policy, intended to make the country self-sufficient, instead left it impoverished. Dissent, both real and imagined, was crushed with a brutality that was extreme even by the standards of the most ruthless caudillos. Few Verdeguayans wept when Rodríguez López was killed. His "legacy" was a country riven with corruption and nepotism, an empty treasury, over ten thousand Verdeguayans killed, and a country whose distribution of wealth and land was the most unequal in the world.

As hated as Rodríguez López was, Verdeguayans later looked back wistfully on his reign; if nothing else, he had provided stability, however tenuous. After his death, the country succumbed to one military coup, revolution, and civil war after another. In one year (1865), the country had no fewer than thirteen different heads of state. By 1880, the country had gone through no less than three hundred coups, and hundreds more attempted coups, two ill-fated and bloody revolutions, and five civil wars, one of which dragged on for almost a decade and decimated nearly a quarter of the population. While most of the rest of the world advanced, Verdeguay stagnated. The masses endured insufferable poverty and the most abysmal living standards, while the landed gentry lived comfortably on large estates the size of small countries and enjoyed living standards that would have made the most regal and grandiose monarch flush with envy. Feudal or semi-feudal conditions persisted in most of the country, and while slavery was technically illegal, the lot of most peasants was indistinguishable from that of slaves in Brazil and the southern United States - and in some ways, a good deal worse.

It was in the mid-late 1860s that Verdeguay's two most prominent and enduring political parties came into being: the Conservatives and the Liberals. Both parties differed little: Both were staunchly reactionary and dominated by the country's tiny wealthy elite. The only differences were that the Conservatives tended to be dominated by the country's wealthy cattle ranchers, while the Liberals were dominated by owners of the country's coffee plantations, and the Liberals also tended to be very slightly less clericalist than the Conservatives (though still quite clericalist). The two parties would alternate in power with semi-regularity, replacing one another through "elections" that resembled mini-civil wars. No distinct policy differentiated the two: Both were predominantly preoccupied with obtaining power, maintaining it, and distributing as many of the spoils to their cronies and sycophants as possible before the other party took power. Of course, military coups remained commonplace, and popular uprisings by landless peasants continued to be an issue in the countryside, but these uprisings were invariably crushed with extreme brutality. As the country's inequality in income and land distribution continued to rise, and political stability remained elusive, the country continued to meander along. In the 1890s, the country made a half-hearted and only partially successful effort to lure European immigration, and small numbers of Spaniards, Germans, Italians, and others arrived, attracted by the abundance of very cheap land; many subsequently became quite wealthy.

Through it all, Verdeguay maintained its isolationist foreign policy. During World War I, the German Empire delivered a small quantity of military vehicles in an unsuccessful attempt to coax Verdeguay into joining the Central Powers, but Verdeguay's only response was to severely scale back immigration, reduce its sparse trade with the outside world even further, and sink further into isolation.

Verdeguay remained completely neutral in World War II and the Cold War, even though it privately sympathized with the United States (Verdeguayan society was staunchly anticommunist and conservative, and the tiny, moribund Communist Party had been banned since its inception). Fears of Soviet subversion gave the Conservative Party (which had returned to power, seemingly for good) the excuse it needed to ban all other political parties in 1951, and assume dictatorial powers (which it already had, albeit unofficially). The state of siege, in place since at least 1911 (under both Liberal and Conservative administrations) remained in place, and the security forces were given unlimited powers to hunt down and exterminate any and all known and suspected Communists in their midst. A climate of fear pervaded the country, and Verdeguayans were as fearful of being forcibly "disappeared" as they were of their economic plight. By the turn of the century, Verdeguayans were still fifty to one hundred years behind most other countries, socially and economically.

The status quo was unequivocablly shattered by a military coup (nobody knew which number it was, because the country had had so many hundreds of them that it stopped counting) launched by a hitherto-unknown general, Andrés Montesinos Geyer. While Montesinos has made some cosmetic changes to the government (by allowing token opposition), it is in the international arena where he made real changes. Radically breaking with the country's isolationist past, he has welcomed any and all foreign investment in the country, massively stepped up trade with the outside world, and announced that all non-Communist countries were welcome to establish diplomatic relations with Verdeguay. Since then, the country's economy has grown explosively, though Verdeguay still lags far behind most other countries in most socioeconomic indices.