Author: Derrick Zhou

By the year 2000, the global left was unrecognizable from its Cold War past.

By the mid-to-late 20th century, the global leftist movement had fractured into multiple competing factions, each claiming to be the “true” path to communism. Trotskyists, Stalinists, and Maoists fought each other more viciously than they fought capitalism, with ideological purity tests turning into bloody purges, guerrilla wars, and assassinations.

By the mid-1960s, Latin America had become the primary Cold War battleground for socialist revolution.

By 1965, Mexico was still reeling from its communist past, while Trotsky’s name became a symbol of defiance across the world. The battle between revolutionary socialism and American imperialism was far from over.

“We have lit the flame of revolution. If they bury me, the world will dig me out. No force, not Stalin, not America, will stop the march of the working class.”

Leon Trotsky’s sudden rise to power in 1942 left Mexico in a state of upheaval. Unlike Stalin’s Soviet model, Trotsky’s vision of socialism rejected bureaucratic authoritarianism and emphasized workers’ democracy, decentralized economic planning, and international revolution. However, maintaining his rule and improving Mexicans’ livelihoods in the face of economic disarray, U.S. hostility, and Stalinist subversion…

In this timeline, Leon Trotsky does not fall to Ramón Mercader’s icepick in August 1940. Instead, his security apparatus, reinforced by sympathizers within Mexico’s left-wing labor movement, uncovers the Stalinist plot against him. Mercader is intercepted and captured, exposing the extent of Soviet infiltration in Mexico. This revelation, combined with growing tensions between the Mexican…

In our world, Leon Trotsky died in exile—his revolution extinguished with an icepick. But in this timeline, he survives. In 1942, as the world burns in war, Mexico erupts in a socialist uprising unlike any before—neither Stalinist nor capitalist, but forged in Trotsky’s vision of permanent revolution. What begins as a beacon of hope soon…