Republic of Las Casas
Major Cities: Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, La Victoria, Puerto Cimarron, Novo Sergipe, Ahmedkala, Drukpo Town
President: Joaquim Cubas

One of the earliest regions to bear the wrath of climate change was Latin America, with hurricanes and flooding in the Caribbean coinciding with drought on a catastrophic scale, largely brought on by the complete destruction of the Amazon in the 2070s. As governments rose and fell and rose again, propped up by different corporate interests (including, of course, the Caldezon Group, with their regional infamous unofficial motto “war sells”), migrants scattered first beyond the Americas, where racial tensions had reached an all-time high, and then beyond Earth itself. The Outer Planets Alliance became their first home, with several divisions of Mexican, Bolivian, and Brazilian volunteers performing admirably in the Solar Rebellions. But whereas the Catholic Church had lost most of its importance on Earth, it remained a sincere cultural and spiritual attachment for a people otherwise adrift - and one that couldn’t be defeated by the Basra Foundation’s strange marriage of tech, Islam, and money.

The Second Exodus came about with the establishment of Elysium Beta, with the Administration’s new power welcoming in workers and those who sought to tame the bizarre ecology of Malakut. Many latinoamericanos joined the first wave of these settlers, alongside other groups largely isolated by the policies of the Outer Planets Alliance: to this day, Chechen dissidents, Tibetan corporate exiles, and descendants of the Tuareg diaspora have all left their mark on Las Casas. But the zeitgeist was and will remain in the hands of a people whose culture was shaped by migration and the maintenance of what heritage they could retain under those conditions; by the time the communities of Las Casas - a name whose etymology stems back to the saint adhered to by most of the migrant faithful by now - were established, they proclaimed themselves free from the states of Sol. Over time, these settlements defended their independence against their neighbors, settling land and sometimes taking it forcefully, either by revolution or simply out of a popular desire for war.

Today, the sole independent state on Malakut is divided roughly into three factions of governance. The first, of course, is the loosely-organized “Catholic” Church in the region, whose theology has been adapted for the realities of interstellar life. They are the paternalistic caretakers of the Las Casans(?), stern in their protection of morality and resistant to the “inhuman” aspects of modern technology. Their most fervent opponents are those who harken back to one of the old World’s first critics and promote a Malakut-centered, technophile version of la Raza Cosmica. While supporters of the Church-in-Exile movement have held the first two presidencies (one lasting for twenty years, the other for two months before his assassination), the ultranationalists continue to dominate through the military and police.

Moderating these two factions, ideally, is the newly elected President Cubas. His vision shares much with the ideology of the South Africans, promoting solidarity against megacorp rule and colonialism, a nationalism based on revolutionary ideals instead of racialism or heritage, and defense of the environment by any means necessary. This has made Las Casas, a nation whose borders are not contiguous, but a patchwork collection of settlements across the planet, even more of a target for would-be adventurers, mercenary companies, and anybody eying fertile land in the planet’s temperate zone.