20th July
Tiso was experiencing a bracing cold shower (he was being rained on while out for a walk) when a messenger interrupted him with vital news from the Foreign Office. Abandoning his idle dreams of some form of covering on a stick to help keep the rain off, Tiso meet up with Tuka and headed to the Cabinet room.
"This vital news had better be actually important." Tiso threatened.
"There is a war on, so none of this rubbish about Soviet Industry moving to Siberia or years late reports about the Fall of Paris." Tuka agreed menacingly.
"This is about war." Durcansky said, passing over the telegram.
The thrilling Peruvian-Ecuadorian border dispute will be covered in unnecessary and terrifying detail in the Butterfly Effect sometime later this decade. Or maybe next. Definitely covered at some point.
Seeing that Tuka was working up his vocal chords for a shouting fit, Durcansky hurriedly continued.
"If it was just a small border war we wouldn't of bothered you, but as Peru was allied to Brazil, and Brazil called in her Allies, this means Ecuador is now at war with all the Western Allies." He said.
At least Venezuela are neutral. And of course there is the Island fortress of the Galapagos to retreat back to. Or there would be, but there aren't any VP there so it wouldn't do any good. Plus Ecuador doesn't have a navy.
Shocked that there was someone worse off than Slovakia Tiso asked the obvious question.
"Why on earth would they be so stupid?" Tiso said, fully aware of the irony.
"We think it's because the Ecuadorian government is composed of idiots." Durcansky said, utterly unaware of any irony at all.
It almost makes the Slovakian cabinet look impressive doesn't it? Almost.
Tiso and Tuka exchanged a glance, hitherto they had thought the Slovak cabinet was as bad as one could get, barring Czechs of course. However as they hadn't let a single scheming, corrupt, thieving master psychologist run almost the entire government they were being forced to reconsider.
"And nobody in Ecuador complained about this particular cabinet?" Tuka asked.
"Apparently not, this sort of thing is pretty common in South America." the Head of Slovak Intelligence chipped in. "For instance the government of Colombia have gone insane." Not-A-German Bernard continued.
Full list of Colombian declarations of war not shown due to space.
Ignoring the fact Colombia had declared war on Ecuador hundreds of times, interest focused on the later part of Colombia's decision.
"They declared as neutral after declaring war, can you do that?" Tiso asked, hope leaping in his heart as he saw a way out for Slovakia.
"I'm afraid not. We checked the Rules of War and Rule 3.4(a)/f Clause 4(xviii) is very clear - Declarations of War are serious, no backsies or returns and crossing your fingers doesn't count." General Catlos confirmed.
"Bugger." Tuka said.
--
All genuine events of course. I struggled to find anything about Juan de Diaz Mera, but that was because the name was badly mangled by Paradox, the name I think they wanted was Juan de Dios Martínez. They got the first name correct I suppose. Juan was President of Ecuador for about a year in the early 1930s before he was kicked out in a coup and retired from politics. Not actually corrupt apparently, or at least not obviously so by the standards of Ecuador. As for Julio Gallegos the head of state he wasn't a General, never had been and wasn't head of state at the time. He was in fact a Radical Liberal minister of public works who became President for two whole days in late May 1944 after a revolution to stop the previous president setting up a dictatorship. Annoyingly they have the correct President in the game files but decided to with the wrong chap because.. Sweden?
On the army side Paradox have got the pictures of Guillermo Freire Posso and Ramon Castro Jion mixed up and, perhaps more importantly, neither of those two were anywhere near power at the time. Instead those two were part of the Board of 63, the four man military Junta who ran the country 1963 and 1966, as was Army Chief Luis Cabrera Sevilla. Still could be worse, Navy Chief Penaherrera certainly isn't correct and probably doesn't exist.
Now knowing much more about Ecuador than you could ever wish to know, I can proudly announce that the next update will have some actual action.!
If only the Slovakian constitution didn't forbid it, I'd recommend renaming this particular 1st Division to the 'Lazarus Division'.
