Pulatec volunteers in the Iqozi-Cuhonhico War

Numerous Pulatec citizens fought as volunteers in the 1967-1971 Iqozi-Cuhonhico War, also known as the Third Uhlangan Civil War. For various reasons, fighters were drawn to join both sides. As the state of Pulacan bordered the conflict zone, Pulatec volunteers made up some of the largest foreign volunteers by nationality in both Iqozi and Cuhonhicah service. The war was an unpopular one in Pulacan, and imposed numerous issues onto the country through disrupted trade, wayward munitions and a massive influx of refugees avoiding conflict. As a result, many Pulatec volunteer fighters were treated with scorn upon their return to Pulacan, especially those that had fought for the defunct Cuhonhico.

Background

For much of the 20th century, the area now comprising the modern state of Phansi Uhlanga was made of two states: the Coyotec-minority-ruled Cuhonhico, and the Komontu-dominated Iqozi. Cuhonhico, along with most of modern-day Pulacan, made up the Malaioan possessions of the predominantly-Nahua Heron Empire up until the 19th century. Though all the territories were nominally under the suzerainty of the subnational monarchy in Ytzac Tlalocan descended from Itzcoatl, in reality their authority was meaningless. Modern-day Pulacan was administered by a governor (Nahuatl: tlatoani) sent by Angatahuaca, and Cuhonhico fell outside of his sphere of control: it was effectively self-governed by an entrenched planter elite almost entirely comprised of Nahua settlers. Due to their distance from the colonial administration, resultant self-reliance and extensive use of slave labor on their plantations, a paternalistic and racist cultural mindset developed among the Cuhonhicah elite. Furthermore, the brutal mistreatment inherent to chattel slavery antagonized the local Komontu populations, leading to frequent raids and attacks on plantations and other Cuhonhicah infrastructure. Thus, when revolution broke out in Pulacan in the late 19th century, Cuhonhico did not similarly break out in widespread civil violence. It was the belief of many of the Cuhonhicah elite that they represented an outpost of Oxidentalese civilization, and that the breakdown of colonial ethnic barriers and subsequent intermixing that had become commonplace in Pulacan was anathema to their civilizing mission. Thus, with the conclusion of the Brothers' War at the turn of the 20th century, there were frequent border skirmishes between Cuhonhicah and Pulatec forces until the fall of Aztapamatlan itself in 1904 to a republican revolution signaled the definitive end of the Heron Empire.

Thus, even after its fall, the Cuhonhicah elite continued to identify themselves with the imperialism of the Heron Empire, and even their increasing Coyotec population self-identified solely with Nahua culture in sharp contrast to both the neighboring Iqozi rejection of Oxidentalese culture and Pulacan's growing embrace of a post-colonial cultural fusion. The newly-independent Cuhonhico organized itself under a plutocratic republic designed to enshrine a collection of planter elite families' feudalistic control of the economy. Over the course of the 20th century, Komontu residents were deprived of their Cuhonhicah citizenship and sorted into various komontustans. These were territory set aside for corraling and centralizing Komontu populations away from Coyotec centers of power under the façade of being quasi-independent polities. Neighboring Iqozi was a monarchy until 1964, ruled by the Iqo royal family. The Iqo monarchs pursued a similar policy of neo-feudalism to their Cuhonhicah neighbors, though this economic system and a famine in the late 1950s served to ultimately destabilize their rule over Iqozi. In 1964, the royal government of Iqozi attempted to normalize relations with Cuhonhico, prompting widespread riots across the country. While initially sporadic, this unrest turned into a full-fledged revolution under the guidance of the outlawed Communist Party of Iqozi (CPI) and its leader, Kalala Ulwazi. Njiba Impisi, then a palace guard, instigated a coup shortly after that deposed the royal family and led to the declaration of the Democratic People's Republic of Iqozi. In exchange for assisting in pacifying the Communist rebels, the now-exiled Iqo royal family turned to Pulacan for assistance in restoring power; finding none, the royal family accepted an offer of Cuhonhicah sovereignty in exchange for military intervention. This intervention, later termed the Second Uhlangan Civil War or the Iqozi Revolution, ended in strategic Cuhonhicah failure and a withdrawal from Iqo territory. Though there were no longer troops on the ground, Cuhonhico refused to recognize Iqozi's independence; seeing them like a komontustan in rebellion, the Cuhonhicah air forces engaged in periodic aerial terror bombing campaigns meant to weaken Iqo morale and disrupt the Democratic Iqozi program of industrialization.

Pulatec volunteers in Cuhonhico

"Tlaloc Battalion" armored cars, southern Cuhonhico, 1970

Pulatec volunteers signed up with the Cuhonhicah armed forces for numerous reasons. One of the main methods of recruitment for Cuhonhico was through magazine advertisements; prior to and during the war years, Cuhonhicah government officials funneled $Xmillion to place advertisements in various publications to encourage "migration" to Cuhonhico. One of the primary incentives for recruitment was a promised "homestead": that, once military service was complete, foreign volunteers would be granted Cuhonhicah citizenship and granted either a free plot of land to farm on or part ownership of a "business farm" or a plantation. Around 5,000 volunteers total made their way into the Cuhonhicah military forces throughout the course of the war. The majority of these were grouped into two all-Pulatec formations known colloquially as the Tlaloc Battalions, after the patron deity of Pulacan. A small number of these soldiers were competent enough to complete officer or non-commissioned officer training; many were assigned to other units as needed, and the Tlaloc Battalions frequently were under-commanded or commanded by Cuhonhicah natives. A high desertion rate meant that the battalions were only ever around 2,500 to 3,000 men in strength at any given point during the war.

Ostensibly, volunteering for military service in a foreign nation as a Pulatec citizen is a violation of the , as is attacking a state with which Pulacan is at peace. As such, recruitment for service in the Cuhonhicah military had to be kept vague to avoid alerting the suspicions of Pulatec law enforcement. Ads would either be vague about which country prospective applicants would serve for, or would advertise homesteading in exchange for "national service," only implying a military aspect to the process. (The latter was insufficient to avoid legal charges; the proprietors of the front company running the advertisement were arrested and deported from Pulacan in 1968.) Regardless, the Pulatec government under Atlahua Motsepe (in power 1965-1972) and the Juwa party were keen on preventing Pulatec citizens from serving in the Cuhonhicah armed forces or otherwise aiding the Cuhonhicah war effort. The regime's segregationalist policies and repeated war crimes (such as the repeated and well-documented use of chemical and biological weapons) meant that a large number of Pulatec were sympathetic to the Iqo side or perturbed by the Cuhonhicah. As such, pro-Cuhonhico propaganda was somewhat hampered in its success, and forced to target specific niches: either those who . These ads frequently downplayed or denied the racial nature of the conflict, instead painting it as a "last stand for civilization against socialism in Malaio" for international sympathy. Often, these advertisements reached the wrong crowd: a significant percentage of those turned away from Cuhonhicah service were classified by recruiters as "too antisocial or insane to serve in a military capacity." Such disqualifications became less frequent as the war progressed, likely indicating not an increase in quality of volunteers but in an increasing desperation to prevent the nation's frontlines from collapsing.

The Pulatec that enlisted with Cuhonhico were predominantly Coyotec or fully Nahuatl. Though not all recruits joined out of an explicit desire to perpetuate a racially-segregated regime, most were aware of the ideological aims of the Cuhonhicah elite. Those that objected to institutional racism on the scale of Cuhonhico would be found out and fail to complete the enlistment process. Some soldiers were completely ambivalent to the ideology of the war; some were ex-convicts who signed up solely for a promise of a stable future and pay. Despite some shared goals, many native Cuhonhicah soldiers held animosity towards Pulatec volunteers. This, combined with rapidly-worsening war conditions and a general lack of fighting quality among Tlaloc Battalion units, contributed to an extremely high desertion rate. Some volunteers were genuine believers in Cuhonhico's racial paternalist ideals or fanatic anti-socialists, willing to die for another nation's ideological cause. Later interviews reveal that some of the Pulatec volunteers, usually the officer class, were often more willing to fight and die specifically for the ideology of the Cuhonhico state than the Cuhonhicah troops they commanded. Others wished to seek adventure or heroic military action without joining Pulacan's Union Security Forces, which by the 1960s had gone 30 years without a major armed engagement.

Pulatec volunteers in Democratic Iqozi

Much like its counterpart, the people that chose to fight with Democratic Iqozi chose to do so for several reasons.

Return to Pulacan

Refugees

All told, the war caused the deaths of 16 million people, or a quarter of the population of Iqozi and Cuhonhico combined.