Chapter 52: That Time I Paved a Highway in South America (2)

TL: Skye

That night, Yu-jin spent hours with the two chairmen, working through what could only loosely be called a negotiation.

To Chairman Yang of International Steel:

"All right. We'll supply the steel at thirty percent below market. But the promise has to hold."

"Of course."

By offering the factory land free of charge, Yu-jin had pried loose a full thirty percent discount.

It was a deal that could only have happened because both sides needed exactly what the other was selling. Yu-jin was scrambling to shave every dollar off the budget, and Chairman Yang, hunting for a way around the American steel tariffs, had picked Central and South America as his way in. Their interests lined up down to the decimal.

And as for Chairman Jeong...

"I'd love nothing more than to just hand the whole thing to Hyunhwa Construction on a turnkey basis, but... as you're aware, that's not something I can do."

"Ha ha ha, no, that wouldn't do at all. We've got a great deal of fishing ahead of us, and you don't hand the rod to someone else. Honestly, I'd rather we cast our lines together. That suits me just fine."

Yu-jin proposed a joint venture.

The name: Tortilla Engineering.

It would be the sole general construction firm in San Marcos, with equity split fifty-fifty. Tortilla Company would put up sixty percent of the capital and Hyunhwa the remaining forty, while Hyunhwa took responsibility for core technical expertise, specialist personnel, and equipment procurement.

Management fell to Hyunhwa, who had construction know-how to burn; finance would be handled by Tortilla.

Having wrapped the negotiations, Yu-jin convened a Cabinet meeting first thing the next morning.

Five whole days had passed since the Resident Registration Project wrapped, and yet the Senior Secretaries assembled in the main conference room looked like hell.

Dark circles dragged down to their cheekbones, their eyes were threaded with red, and from the hollows under their cheekbones it was clear none of them had been eating properly.

That was what happened when you worked yourself into the ground to push a project like that through.

"His Excellency is entering."

At Anna, the Protocol Secretary's announcement, everyone rose.

"Good morning. All right, all right, we're pressed for time today, so let's skip the ceremony and sit down."

At Yu-jin's greeting, everyone took their seats.

"I'm told the Resident Registration Project has landed successfully, and that's thanks to the hard work every one of you put in. Isabella?"

"Yes."

Isabella stood and handed Yu-jin a stack of prepared envelopes.

Yu-jin made a lap of the room and personally placed an envelope in each Senior Secretary's hands.

"Nothing much, just a token of appreciation for your service. Public servants are working professionals too, and if the pay doesn't match the effort, where's the motivation? Ah. Now don't get your hopes up, it's not a fortune. The national coffers are a bit tight, after all. Isn't that right, Ricardo, Senior Secretary for Finance?"

"Your Excellency is correct. National development takes precedence."

"Once San Marcos becomes a developed country, I'll make it up to you ten times over. Fifty times over. So don't hold it against me."

The room loosened at Yu-jin's joke. He sat down, and his expression turned apologetic.

"I'm sorry to say this, but there's another job that's going to require you all to suffer through it."

"......"

Barely five days since they'd closed out a national-scale project. The Senior Secretaries' faces tightened, until they caught Isabella's glare and visibly pulled themselves together.

"Whatever it is, Your Excellency, you have only to command us."

"Wherever Your Excellency points, be it fire or flood, we'll run."

"Grinding ourselves down for the nation is the least we can do."

"My dream is to die of overwork."

Yu-jin smiled softly at their enthusiasm.

"Having all of you here gives me peace of mind."

Yu-jin meant it. What kind of office worker, after four months of clocking out every other day, volunteers to do it all again?

"Good. Let's get to the point, then."

"......"

"I'm going to build a highway."

"Your Excellency... when you say a highway, which stretches are we talking about connecting?"

"Have a look at this first. Anna."

Anna fired up the projector, and a map of San Marcos appeared on the screen, crisscrossed with red lines, both straight and curving.

"It's a rough sketch, but... broadly speaking, I'm looking at building highways throughout the country, along these lines."

One glance was enough to see it: a highway network stretching across the entirety of San Marcos. The Senior Secretaries, confronted with a scale almost impossible to picture, found their voices unsteady.

"Y, Your Excellency... with respect, San Marcos has neither the manpower nor the equipment to construct a road project of that size."

"The budget is also an issue. Given what the Resident Registration Project already cost, we simply don't have the capacity for civil works on that scale."

"The timing is also problematic. Right now, administrative resources should be focused on the rural populations we've just registered."

"And on top of that, whether there's even any point in building roads..."

It was a solid wall of opposition, and yet Yu-jin smiled as if he were enjoying himself.

'San Marcos has really come this far... Is the same country?'

Compared to the old days, when his brother-in-law was pushing soap factories so he could buy soap to hand out, and officials were inventing unnecessary construction projects just to siphon budget, this was genuinely tremendous progress.

Of course, that was that, and a highway was a highway.

"I know. It makes no sense. Honestly, when the only real city we've got is Libertad, there's no reason to lay a highway network like this all at once. The maintenance costs alone will bleed us. But."

Yu-jin met the Senior Secretary's eyes.

"Even so, we have to do it. Because."

"......"

"The state has a duty to provide for the 2.7 million citizens who've just entered the system through this Resident Registration Project."

In a modern society, the state was a service provider. Healthcare, education, pensions, housing, services across the full arc of a citizen's life, paid for through the taxes it collected in return.

But San Marcos, as it stood, wasn't in any position to deliver the whole suite.

So which services came first?

The answer, as it happened, was already written in the history books.

"The state has to give them lives that, if not wealthy, are at least stable."

Jobs. Just as the United States had pulled itself out of the Great Depression with the New Deal, Yu-jin intended to flood the country with employment as the state's core service offering.

"Right now, San Marcos has effectively gained 2.7 million new citizens. Not a single one of them has ever paid a cent in taxes. Why did it turn out that way? Because the state had nothing to offer them. And yet..."

"......"

"The moment we offered them education as a service, registrations poured in. The moment we offered land leases, people who had been hiding in the mountains and the jungles came flooding down. What drove them to make that choice?"

"......"

"The answer is simple. They've come to believe that, this time, the state will actually improve their lives."

Yu-jin's voice gathered weight.

"And if we turn around now and say there's no land, no budget, and leave them hanging, what happens then? They go back to the mountains. And they lose faith in the state forever."

"......"

"I'm not willing to give up on them. Even if it means overextending, I want to make them part of this society. And this highway project is the only way to do two things at once: give them jobs they can live on, and buy us the time to prepare the land we'll lease them."

It was, in truth, an utterly calculated reason. Once a person loses trust, winning it back is exponentially harder.

One only had to look at other countries to see it. Political factions split along lines of belief and ideology, each side distrusting the other, forever and ever, amen.

For now the rural population was small and politically weightless, easy to ignore. But when San Marcos became a middle-income country, and then a developed one, would they still be ignorable?

'Not a chance.'

The citizens of Libertad and the citizens of the countryside would fracture and grow to loathe each other. It was inevitable.

Better, then, to pay the price now. The social cost of overextending today would be a pittance next to the cost of neglect later. That was Yu-jin's calculation.

But his calculations landed very differently in the ears of the Senior Secretaries.

'He's even looking out for those undocumented people who've never paid a cent in tax... what kind of man...'

'All we did was whine about how hard it was, and His Excellency was looking past us, past all of this, at the people beyond!'

'He really... he truly thinks of nothing but the citizens!'

'He's nothing short of a blessing upon San Marcos...!'

'Yu-jin Choi, could he be a god?'

Quiet sniffles broke out here and there, each more moved than the last. The zombies who had been dying on their feet moments ago now had the specific, unmistakable gleam of the true believer in their eyes.

And then:

"Your Excellency! We were shortsighted!"

"We'll complete it if it kills us!"

"It will be done, without fail!"

The Senior Secretaries, overcome, bowed their heads to the floor.

It was the moment the loyalty gauge of the Senior Secretaries pegged out at MAX.

*

The second the Cabinet meeting ended, every ministry in the government hit the panic button.

"Orders from His Excellency! Drop whatever you're doing, right now, assemble!"

The Ministry of Defense inspected every piece of engineering corps equipment in inventory and issued mobilization orders. Officials at the Ministry of Education pulled all-nighters drafting a safety manual a kindergartener could follow. Ministry of Construction and Housing staff scattered across the country, scouting every stretch of land that might plausibly serve as highway corridor.

And that was only the start. The Ministry of Commerce was on the phone to materials suppliers around the world, hunting down the cheapest materials it could find, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quietly asking the Korean government whether ODA assistance was on the table and, if so, how much.

Officials from other ministries deployed to regional offices, bracing themselves for the administrative chaos sure to follow. That went without saying.

And in the middle of it all, the inaugural CEO who would take over management of Tortilla Engineering arrived.

"Good to meet you, Your Excellency. I'm Jeong Minsik. I'll be serving as the first CEO of Tortilla Engineering."

Yu-jin's friend, and Chairman Jeong's grandnephew, Jeong Minsik.

Yu-jin was still blinking in surprise when Chairman Jeong laid a hand on Minsik's shoulder and gave a hearty chuckle.

"Your Excellency asked for the most trustworthy man I could find, and when I went looking, nobody fit the bill like this boy. I guarantee his management skills personally. Wherever he falls short, I'll be right behind him. No cause for concern."

Yu-jin swallowed a laugh.

"In your hands, then, Minsik. Ah, my mistake: CEO Jeong."

"Leave it to me, Your Excellency."

And so Tortilla Engineering launched itself into operations, and from the very first day, the pace was nothing short of earth-shattering.

Chairman Jeong, a grandee of the Korean business world, rang the bell of general mobilization across the Korean construction industry.

"Hey, CEO Yang? Business slow these days? Why don't you come on out to San Marcos? Loads of work here. I'll push subcontracts your way, so equipment, engineers, whatever you've got sitting idle, bring the whole lot over. What? Money? Come on, man. It's a developing country, how much do you think they're going to pay? Call it break-even and be grateful. What? Can't come if there's no profit? Suit yourself. Construction's frozen at home anyway, you'll just be burning payroll sitting around. Word is those project financing loans have you practically choking already. Sit on your hands and go under, then."

Under Chairman Jeong's orchestration, line-level executives from Korean construction firms started dropping into Libertad Airport day after day, while container ships rolled into the harbor at a similar tempo, unloading construction equipment of every conceivable kind.

And so a frantic month passed without a moment to breathe, until one day:

"Your Excellency, the final estimate is in."

"Oh?"

Yu-jin found himself holding an invoice with 23 billion dollars written on it.

"That's actually..."

Having checked the number, Yu-jin gave a small laugh.

"Pretty decent, isn't it?"

San Marcos today was no longer the San Marcos of the past, the one that used to sweat over a single hundred million dollars.