A required leave of absence.
Happy day for all our adorable readers. On August 12th, I found myself experiencing an unexpected brash but impetuous accident. I fell while speedily crossing one main street to avoid the cars that might hit me. The location where I tumbled has its flaws. There is a little division between the two lines of this road, one side is built with asphalt, and the other side is built with cement. The difference in levels between both ground surfaces is clearly a slight stair of around 10 centimeters, a problem not just for cars, but also for passersby. Irremediably, my left foot put up with all my weight over that step, and so, I plunged into the warm concrete surface. “Ugh, I thought, the cars would run over me!”. Then I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t. Pathetically, another foot fracture materialized in seconds. My left fifth metatarsal bone was crushed at its base. Afterward, I was put on mandatory rest, with limited mobility. During the last 54 days, I have been wearing an immobilization boot, following the prescription of my orthopedical doctor, and embracing a pair of beloved crutches that allow me to walk at home. However, I am still in recovery. The next 3 months will be crucial for this foot’s full healing. I expect some mandatory kinesiology and physiotherapy exercises, which can´t be overlooked. Walking again with shoes won´t be the issue. The real problem that concerns me is the long process that my foot will go through, progressively, to return to the normal condition of my prior athletic lifestyle. I understand the last phase of healing a fracture is called bone remodeling. This has already begun. I will need a few hours a day for self-care, to strictly comply with the future exercise recommendations from my doctor. Given the latter context, I apologize for not writing during the last weeks.

The reality is that we are happy to be back.
We are now beneath a most positive season and kicking off this beautiful saga about Central America. This saga wishes to show a new overview of the historical facts with a distinct perspective. As usual, our innovative content wishes you to think about reality differently. A new point of view, studying the historical information that flows from reading so many marvelous authors who have been composing their findings to disentangle the truth about our region. I will write as a Central American Citizen, and all our strategic efforts will be indirectly instructed and drilled by the historians and economic specialists who have written about us with so much dedication. From here on, our saga is to honor all the researchers who will go with us for the next three seasons. We want to pay tribute to their work, many times not recognized by our societies. Their books and papers (rightfully written or not) have been done with devotion, with sacrifice, and most of the time without an official budget, deprived of sponsorships, and without any robust academic economic support. The best historians and historiographers of Central America scarcely have made a survival living, and I have learned that many of them have settled in extreme poverty for several years until a University or an Educational Grant was won. This only occurred because a few “unconventional” foreign professors came to our region, and they unlocked a tiny rite of passage for academic funding from their international academic entities to their Central American local academic counterparts. My anticipated gratitude and appreciation to all these authors, investigators, and professors who have written about Central America’s past, present, and future. All of them will be named in our sources of reference as usual.

Three Seasons for Central America.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy has decided to dedicate one year of her life to Central America. It is my region of birth. I must do it. We have divided the content of our subjects into three seasons. Between today to December 13th, we will publish 13 episodes. This is the first season of the saga. In parallel, this is the period that I will be industriously engaged with my physiotherapy and foot recovery special routines. By Christmas, I expect to be fully rehabilitated.
The second season of the saga will kick off on January 24th, 2025, and we will close it on April 11th, 2025, right before Palm Sunday of our Christian Holy Week. Season 3 of this saga will begin on May 9th, 2025, and we expect to finish the entire content on August 1st, 2025.

Let´s see this scheme below:

Central America: A Quest for the Progression of Economic Value. Season I
From 1492 to 1700: Historical Economic Foundations.
We inaugurate this saga with this publication. It will be about the period of Central America’s economic development between 1492 to 1700. Our journey will immerse us entirely in the historical roots of the economic premises of this region. Our window of analysis starts in 1492, with King Ferdinand II of Aragon-Naples-Sicily & Queen Isabella of Castile, the Catholic Spaniard Monarchs, and how they found America through Christopher Columbus by mistake. The history of the Catholic Rulers and Columbus is a must episode in our quest to understand Central America, because any corporate strategy from the past always takes us to the royal courts, to the palaces and castles where the kings and emperors were taking economic-financing-social and expansion decisions about their own empires’ growth. We will try to focus on what was happening in Spanish America from the point of view of economics when the transition from Castile-Aragón Rulers passed the baton to the Habsburgs of the Netherlands and Austria, leaders of the Holy Roman Empire. And we will finalize Season 1 of this saga when the Bourbons took the lead in 1700. We will repossess history from our corporate strategy views, and we will avoid at all costs falling into another historiography. Our aim is to explore the foundations, the basis of these forgotten nations which during the last 500 years have coined a unique “philosophy” of survival: migrating out of the Central American territory in their quest for progression of economic value. For those experts in USA immigration topics, we expect that you will understand a new conceptualization of why around 3.3 million Central Americans (1) have transferred to the USA, legally or not. Further, during season 1 (From October to December 2024), we will concentrate all our efforts on finding the truth behind the design of the philosophical beliefs of the region between 1492 to 1700. Most of the historical economic tales of Central America from that period were recorded by the representatives of the Crown of Spain. The foundations of our economic systems were conceived during the Habsburg period of Imperial Spain (1524-1700). Particularly, after the “conquistadores” avalanche took place. The Spanish Central America economic development can´t be studied as an integrated region because it was not conquered in one way but in two directions. The first wave led from México going down from the Aztec lands up to the Gulf of Fonseca; and in parallel, a second wave coming from Panama to Nicaragua. The Spanish royal crown (Castile and Aragón), who sponsored the “Conquista” of the New World, didn´t remain in power to envision a robust strategy of what to do afterward with such a vast continent. The kingdom of Castile-Aragon was trying to copy and paste the government model of Royal Audiences of the Mother Iberian territories to the New World; at the moment when the Catholic Queen Isabella, inherited her imperial dreams to Joanna of Castile who was declared “Mad” and unable to rule such aspirations. The Spanish Castile-Aragon corporate strategy pursued the philosophy of setting royal audiences such as the first one they commanded to create in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in 1511, and a second one in México in 1527.
Joanna´s husband, Philip the Handsome (son of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I of Austria and Mary of Burgundy), was the ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands; but officially he died in 1506, leaving Imperial Spain on stand-by; until Charles V (their first son) was declared the king of Spain (1516) and Holy Roman Emperor (1519). Our saga will also provide our interpretation of Charles V’s economic policy for Spanish America, landing specifically in Central America. The introduction of the Royal Audience of Santiago de Guatemala, also called Audience of Los Confines in Antigua Guatemala (1543) will give us a pivotal hypothesis of this region, in comparison to what was occurring with the Royal Audience and Chancery of Panamá in Tierra Firme (2).

There was an incipient “modus territorial organization in Spanish America” when King Charles V (b. 1500- d.1556) arrived in power. He substituted the Spanish Royal Audiences with Vice Royalties. Consequently, Spanish American organization wasn´t a smooth and soft territorial “mis en place”. As I have mentioned in our saga “From the Enlightenment to Business Models”, the rivalries of Europe traveled and were transferred to the New World colonial settlement, but subtly. Spain’s new treasure was too much to handle in the hands of the H.R.E and King Charles V. This observation only reaffirms to us that whatever happened after the death of Queen Isabella and Ferdinand II of Castile-Aragon-Naples-Sicily left their nascent empire with a door open to their explicit foes: with a direct huge religious economic philosophical war in the hands of the Tudor king of England, Henry VIII (who married first with Catherine of Aragon, the sister of Joanna); and further territorial conflicts between the way of growing an empire under the Habsburgs (Austrian-Dutch roots) who also added more adversaries from East Europe too. The alliance of Joanna of Aragon and Philip the Handsome of the Habsburg-Netherlands took the corporate strategy of Spanish America to a new astonishing level. Moreover, we will discover that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish American expansion moves of the first “conquistadores”, the pioneer representatives from Castile-Aragón were not what the new Spanish Habsburgs wanted to do either.
The clash of both monarchical styles (Spanish Castile-Aragon vs Austrian-Dutch Habsburg) in terms of leadership, state authority, territorial organization, and economic expansion in the new Imperial Spanish America became a relevant cause of conflicts, political fragmentation, insecurity, resentments, fake news, disagreements and incertitude during the settlement of the new Iberian Spanish empire in the region.

Why do we go back to 1492 to understand Central America´s economic development?
The Royal Audience of Santiago de Guatemala created by royal decree by Charles V in 1543 is the main reason Central America is what it is now. It took more than 15 years for Emperor Charles V (3,4) to figure out which suitable territorial division structure could be better off for the royal economic interests of his new Spanish-Habsburg empire. For those who have forgotten who Charles V was, we will unearth interesting aspects of his “imperial corporate strategy” soon.

When the Real Audiencia of Santiago de Guatemala, also called Royal Audience of Los Confines, became the Kingdom of Guatemala (under the official name of Captaincy General of Guatemala in 1609), this territory widened from Chiapas to Costa Rica, which is our main territorial dominion for this saga. We can assure you that the isthmus of Central America, was a cause of painful ping-pong decision-making, as far as historians and historiographers can confirm to us. Between 1524 to 1609, the extension of the territories of the Royal Audience of Santiago de los Caballeros of the Province of Guatemala was changed at least 7 times!. Given the uncertain times of the region, the Roman Catholic Church, direct representatives of the Pope, and the Holy Roman Empire participated actively and closely in agglutinating the religious-philosophical sense of the Imperial Spanish Territory in developing Colonial Central America. I dare to state that our region was shaped by their philosophical moves and guidance. It was during the 16th century, that the first Habsburg rulers of Spanish America, decided to give childbirth to the forefather of Central America, called the Kingdom of Guatemala. We will uncover why it happened as such. We will also try to answer the question: Why was this region called the Kingdom of Guatemala? Was it because this land appealed to the Habsburgs and the Castile-Aragón descendants, as a precious private hacienda to be reserved under a special unique protectorate? Or was the region planned to be kept under development, to maintain a new special colony, the equivalent Outremer arm, a remarkable extension for the successors of the first Spanish Habsburg Royal Family, a Catholic far-away style refuge, just in case their beloved Europe Regina would be demolished in the future?. This last idea comes from our own investigation inferences. We will find out why during the next weeks.

We expect that you can stick with our valuable content for the rest of 2024. Be confident that before Christmas, you will have a new visualization about our region. For today we have completed our scope. We invite you to imagine all we will learn during the following year.

Find our slides with our outline, philosophy, rationale, and objectives below. Feel free to download and/or print the document and keep it on a file for your records.

Announcement.
Next Friday 11th of October, we will travel in time to the year 1492. Our next chapter is Episode 2 “Castile & Aragon: Discovery of Spanish America”.

Musical Section.
Our melodious selection of music during this saga will be served with songs and concerts that could have been at the top of a Billboard list during the century of our themes. Today, we have chosen the soundtrack from the Ridley Scott film “1492: Conquest of Paradise”, from the Greek composer Vangelis, best known for his Academy Award-winning score for the film Chariots of Fire. The film was a 500th-anniversary commemoration of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World.

Thank you for reading http://www.eleonoraescalantestrategy.com. It is a privilege to learn. Blessings.

Sources of reference and Bibliography utilized today. All will be posted on our next episode. This is just our prelude!

(1) https://cis.org/Report/Central-American-Immigrant-Population-Increased-Nearly-28Fold-1970
(2) https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-LH-1998-62
(3)https://www.emperorcharlesv.com/charles-v/charles-vs-family/wife-and-children/
(4) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-V-Holy-Roman-emperor

Disclaimer: Eleonora Escalante paints Illustrations in Watercolor. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. All are used as Illustrative and non-commercial images. Utilized only informatively for the public good. Nevertheless, most of this blog’s pictures, images, or videos are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images unless otherwise stated.