Chapter 119: That Time I Built a First-Generation New Town in South America (6)

TL: Skye

The workers who had come over from Venezuela to work at Tortilla Farm received different treatment from the existing rehabilitation workers.

The reason was simple.

These people were not criminals from San Marcos, but foreign workers who had come to work under contract.

Their pasts could hardly be called spotless, but they were still foreigners who had entered the country under an official agreement between nations, which meant any mistreatment could become an international issue. On top of that, they were workers who had traveled a long way to work for San Marcos.

So the Farm Management Bureau ran things a little differently from before.

First, wake-up time was pushed back until morning, and the food was improved by doubling the previous budget.

Breakfast was bread and milk, lunch was stew with meat, and dinner was tortillas, beans, and meat.

For people who had struggled to get even one meal a day in Venezuela, it was practically a heavenly menu.

The biggest change was that complete freedom was guaranteed after the workday ended.

They could play soccer in the square in front of the barracks or sit around playing cards.

The supervisors, too, merely walked around checking on things like Company Sergeants in the Korean army instead of standing guard with rifles.

In short, the difficulty setting had been lowered from Hard to Easy.

But.

The Tortilla Farm administration had failed to understand what peculiar creatures human beings could be.

Once people get to sit down, they want to lie down. Once they lie down, they want to sleep. And once their stomachs are full, they start noticing other things.

“We can't even go outside. Is this a farm or a prison?”

“We can't leave on Sundays either? I want to go out and have a damn drink!”

“No women, no booze, and we can't even go anywhere. You call this living?!”

Freedom was the problem.

They were fed.

They had somewhere to sleep.

The work was bearable.

But they couldn't go outside.

To be precise, even if they did go outside, there was nothing to do.

Tortilla Farm had originally been a facility isolated from the outside world.

They were free to go beyond the fence, but that was as far as their freedom went.

There was nothing outside anyway, and if they wandered beyond a certain distance, the guards stationed around the perimeter would stop them.

Work, eat, sleep.

That was everyday life at Tortilla Farm.

And as time passed, the complaints finally began to boil over.

“Give us freedom! We came here to work! We didn't come here as slaves!”

“What good is earning money?! There's nowhere to spend it!”

They weren't unreasonable complaints.

But from the Farm Management Bureau's perspective, there wasn't much else they could do.

It wasn't as though they could move a city next to Tortilla Farm.

And they certainly couldn't turn people with criminal records loose in the capital, Libertad.

In the end, their frustration was racing toward a breaking point.

And there was one man who recognized that breaking point perfectly and chose to set it off.

Enrique Valdes.

According to his official record, he had only minor convictions such as petty theft. In reality, however, he was a mid-level boss in Tren de Aragua, Venezuela's largest criminal gang.

The only reason he had passed the interview and managed to come to San Marcos in the first place was that he'd never been caught for the countless vicious crimes he'd committed over the years, including drug trafficking and human trafficking.

He had never come to San Marcos looking for a job in the first place.

He had infiltrated the country under orders from his boss to seize control of San Marcos's underworld now that the rival gangs had disappeared.

And if he accomplished the mission, he had been promised not only independence, but also the right to distribute cocaine produced in Venezuela.

It was nothing short of a gold mine.

Up until then, Enrique had thought the plan was perfect.

'Taking over an underworld with no competition will be easier than fishing.'

But then a problem came up...

Because of a petty theft he'd committed as a kid, he was loaded onto a yellow bus and sent straight to Tortilla Farm.

Instead of reaching Libertad's back alleys, he'd been dumped in the middle of a cornfield.

'What the hell is this?!'

Enrique Valdes had been utterly dumbfounded when he first arrived at the farm.

His entire plan had fallen apart before he could even get started.

'I can't stay here. I have to get out somehow.'

For the first few days, Enrique quietly observed his surroundings.

The number of perimeter guards.

Shift-change times.

Weak points in the barbed wire.

Escape routes.

But no matter how he looked at it, escaping alone was impossible.

Even if he made it beyond the barbed wire, the nearest road was a two-day walk away. And walking all the way to Libertad, his actual destination, was impossible.

In the end, he needed a vehicle.

Enrique revised his plan.

First, he waited until the fourth wave of arrivals.

And finally, once the number of workers at Tortilla Farm exceeded twenty thousand, Enrique began systematically stirring up discontent among them.

“Brothers, don't you think something about this is strange?”

Every evening, he quietly gathered people behind the barracks and fanned their grievances.

“We're supposed to be grateful because they feed us and give us a place to sleep? Don't make me laugh. We came here to work at construction sites. We didn't come here to cut corn on some farm.”

“That's right! They tricked us!”

“They won't even let us go outside or make phone calls. Is this a workplace or a prison?”

“A prison!”

In truth, they could make phone calls.

They simply didn't because they had to pay international calling charges.

But Enrique and his men cleverly distorted facts like that and used them to stir people up.

“If we stay like this, we'll rot here forever. Contract period? You think people who planned to honor that crap would lock us up out here?”

“Then what do we do?”

“We leave.”

“Leave? How?”

Enrique grinned.

“How are they going to stop twenty thousand people if we all move at once? How many soldiers do they have? Two hundred? Three hundred? Twenty thousand against three hundred. The answer's obvious.”

The logic of numbers.

Simple, but powerful.

And in truth, if twenty thousand people rose up at once, it looked physically impossible to stop them.

Enrique's agitation proved effective.

Not all twenty thousand agreed with him, but plenty of people were swept up by the mood.

Discontent spread like an epidemic, and then one evening.

The moment Enrique finished dinner, he gave the signal.

“I can't take this anymore!”

“This is a prison, not a farm! We're free people! Contract workers! There's no reason for us to be locked up here!”

“That's right!”

“Let's go! Let's get out of here!”

Thousands of people swept up by his agitation poured out of the barracks.

It wasn't all twenty thousand.

But there were more than ten thousand.

Their roar tore through the morning sky.

“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

The first thing the mob did after losing all reason was destroy the barracks.

Crack! Smash!

Wooden posts snapped and plywood walls tore apart.

They overturned beds and smashed windows.

Next came the farm.

Someone raised a torch.

The cornfields caught fire.

Crackle! Crack-crackle!

Flames swallowed the night sky.

It was the first rebellion in Tortilla Farm's history.

“Let's go to the administrative office! Drag those bastards out!”

Enrique took the lead and guided the crowd forward.

More than ten thousand people surged toward the administrative office.

The guards fired warning shots, but it did no good.

Bang! Bang!

“You think a few gunshots are going to scare us?! We heard gunfire every damn day in the back alleys of Caracas!”

He wasn't wrong.

For people who had grown up in Venezuela's slums, gunshots were part of everyday life.

Handguns weren't enough to frighten them.

Eventually, the guards began giving ground under the sheer weight of numbers.

Physically stopping ten thousand people with 250 men was impossible.

Up to that point, Enrique's calculations appeared to be correct.

But there was one thing he had never considered...

This was Tortilla Farm, the very heart of San Marcos's rehabilitation system.

These days everyone might laugh and joke around, but in the early days, the atmosphere here had been nothing short of vicious.

The people...

And the equipment...

Whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup!

A deafening roar erupted overhead along with a violent gale.

Enrique looked up and saw two attack helicopters cutting through the darkness.

Their searchlights snapped on.

White beams illuminated the crowd of ten thousand.

Ratatatatatatatatatatat!

Machine-gun fire from the door guns swept over the crowd's heads.

Warning fire.

But the warning alone was more than enough.

Handguns and machine guns were worlds apart.

As dirt erupted like waves wherever the bullets struck, everyone froze.

Even in the brutal back alleys of Caracas, none of them had ever seen or heard anything like this.

“W-what the hell?!”

“Helicopters! The helicopters are shooting at us!”

“How the fuck does this make any sense?!”

The crowd stopped in its tracks.

And at that exact moment.

Rrrrrrrrrumble!

A cloud of dust billowed up from the dirt road below.

Two armored vehicles were charging toward them.

The barrels of the 12.7 mm heavy machine guns mounted on top pointed directly at the crowd.

Helicopters pinned them down from above while armored vehicles blocked them from below.

The crowd of ten thousand froze in an instant.

The blood drained from Enrique's face.

'What the...'

This was supposed to be a farm.

So why the hell did a farm have armored vehicles and helicopters?

“Fxxx!”

Just as the curse burst from Enrique's mouth, a voice boomed from the loudspeakers mounted throughout the facility.

“Drop all weapons and lie face down. If you are not on the ground within ten seconds, we will open fire with live ammunition.”

There was no need to count.

The rebels broke before they even reached three.

Torches fell to the ground.

Sticks were thrown aside.

More than ten thousand people dropped face down onto the dirt.

And just like that, the first rebellion in Tortilla Farm's history ended in thirty minutes.

The series of incidents, from the construction site to Tortilla Farm, was reported to Yu-jin as soon as dawn broke.

Yu-jin clutched his head after receiving the report.

A massive brawl at the construction site.

123 injured.

27 seriously injured.

Construction delayed by two days.

And on top of that, a rebellion at Tortilla Farm.

More than ten thousand people had apparently wrecked the barracks, set the farm on fire, and charged the administrative office.

They had barely managed to stop them by deploying armored vehicles and helicopters.

'Things were going a little too smoothly.'

Yu-jin squeezed his eyes shut.

A sigh escaped him on its own, but what else could he do?

It had happened, and now he had to clean up the mess.

'This was bound to happen eventually.'

Even in Korea, fights between foreign workers and local workers taking sides against each other weren't exactly rare.

Even if they could communicate, San Marcos had taken in tens of thousands of workers from another country. Maybe an incident like this had been inevitable.

Yu-jin looked at Isabella and asked.

“Director, what do you think we should do?”

“I believe the ringleaders should be deported. If we repatriate those who participated in the violence at the construction site and the leaders of the farm rebellion back to Venezuela, things should settle down.”

“I don't think we should do that.”

“...We shouldn't?”

“The Venezuelans weren't the only ones at fault in the construction-site brawl. Our own citizens fought too. Where are we supposed to send them?”

Yu-jin continued.

“And if we solve every problem by throwing people out, we'll never address the root cause. If we throw them out once, we'll have to throw people out next time too, and the time after that. Eventually, we won't have anyone left to work.”

“Hmm. This isn't easy.”

He looked out the window for a moment.

'If I can't handle even this much, then there's nothing I'll ever be able to accomplish.'

Yu-jin turned back and said.

“Let's just keep them working.”

Isabella's eyes widened.

“What? But if we do that, the same thing could happen again...”

“Director.”

Yu-jin spoke calmly.

“More than a thousand pyeong of the farm burned down this time, didn't it? The people responsible need to compensate us for the damage.”

“C-compensate us for the damage?”

“Yes. We can't exactly collect it from them directly, so we'll have them work it off instead. Isn't that only natural?”

Ever since the early days of his rule, Yu-jin had held to one political principle: if someone caused harm to others, they should repay it through labor if necessary.

“However.”

Yu-jin's expression hardened.

“From now on, let's make sure our supervision and security are thorough enough that nothing like this ever happens again.”

At that moment.

Isabella felt goosebumps rise all over her body.

She had realized Yu-jin's intention.

He wouldn't deport them.

He wouldn't throw them out.

Instead, he would keep them working.

And whenever they caused damage, it would be deducted from their wages.

In other words.

He intended to make them repay their crimes through labor.

If they were thrown out, that was the end of it.

But if they stayed, they could be kept working.

It was the same philosophy behind Tortilla Farm's rehabilitation system.

The point wasn't to punish them. It was to make them work. And through that process, order would naturally take hold, and they would be rehabilitated.

'His Excellency has no intention of simply letting this slide.'

Isabella remained silent for a moment before lowering her head.

“Understood. I will handle it according to Your Excellency's wishes.”

“Then I'll leave it to you.”

And so a military unit was immediately dispatched to the New Town construction site, while security at Tortilla Farm was tightened back to the level it had been when the first gang members were brought in.

As for Enrique, the ringleader, and his men...

“W-where the hell is this?!”

“Where do you think? It's where you'll be working from now on. Say hello. These are the coworkers you'll be working with from now on.”

Their assigned workplace was changed to an underground coal mine filled with San Marcos's most serious criminals, where they would work off the cost of restoring the cornfields they had burned.

*****

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