Chapter 72: That Time I Held an Election in South America (2)

TL: Skye

After the Libertad speech, I launched into the campaign in earnest.

The Resident Registration Project had folded a huge wave of unregistered persons into the system, which meant the mood out in the rural farming villages mattered now too.

So there I was, riding a jeep toward mountain backcountry that barely showed up on any map.

Clunk!

The jeep, tearing down the unpaved road, bounced violently into the air.

"Your Excellency, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. What about you, Isabella, are you okay?"

"I've been through far worse. This is nothing."

"Worse?"

"Back in my SIA days."

"Ah... right, of course. What sort of work did you do at the SIA?"

"Mostly intelligence gathering and covert operations."

"Makes sense, I suppose."

There was no way they'd ever send an elite like Isabella out into the rough stuff...

"I did assassinate the occasional anti-government figure, but that only came up now and then, so it wasn't much of a hardship."

...Okay, so apparently there was.

"...Th-that must have been hard on you."

"Still, thanks to the former president's favor, I was reassigned to the secretariat fairly quickly."

"I see."

On this front, at least, former President Juan seemed to have done well.

At the time I couldn't guess his intentions, but looking back now, it seemed he'd marked both me and Isabella as Ian's political partners.

Otherwise there's no way he'd have made people as young as me and Isabella a minister and a chief of staff.

'Looking at stuff like this, the man definitely wasn't a complete airhead.'

He just didn't have the chops to actually run a country, that's all.

As I was nodding along to myself, the bodyguard at the wheel spoke up.

"We'll arrive in ten minutes."

Soon enough, a cluster of mud-brick houses huddled together came into view through the window.

Screech.

Word of my arrival must have spread, because the moment I stepped out of the car the villagers came swarming.

A village left with nothing but the elderly, the children, and the women.

It made sense, really. The young men would all have gone off to earn money at the highway construction sites.

"Thank you all for such a warm welcome."

"Y-Your Excellency! Oh, Your Excellency!"

When I held out my hand to the old man at the very front, he broke down sobbing.

With his rough, wrinkled hands and the deep creases carved into his face, he looked like a man well past eighty.

"Bwahuhuh! That Your Excellency would come all the way out to this backwater in person! It's as if this old man's lifelong wish has come true! I could die now with no regrets!"

"You look perfectly healthy. Surely you're not going anywhere just yet. How old are you, if I may ask?"

"Sixty-three this year. Old enough that it'd be no surprise to drop dead any day now."

"......?"

For a moment, I doubted my own ears.

Back in rural Korea, that was practically young enough to head the village youth association, wasn't it?

'He looks way older than that, though?'

I took another look at the village chief, and it hit me.

'He's just... had a brutally hard life.'

Something in my chest grew heavy.

The numbers I'd been patting myself on the back over at the Cabinet meeting a few days earlier meant absolutely nothing out here.

A lifetime of backbreaking labor under the blazing sun, with never enough nourishing food to eat, had simply aged him before his time.

A reality where falling ill meant no money for a hospital, and no hospital to go to in the first place.

In the countryside, a long life wasn't a blessing. It was a luxury.

'I'd gotten way too cocky.'

Faced with that old man's calloused hands, I felt endlessly ashamed.

My heart stayed heavy the whole time I toured the village.

"Do you have electricity here?"

"Not yet, no."

"Running water?"

"We use the village's shared well. Come the rainy season it runs muddy, but let it settle a bit and it does the job well enough."

The toilet was an even bigger spectacle.

A pit dug into the ground, posts of rotting wood propped up around it, a few tattered straw mats slung up as partitions: it was a dead ringer for the open-pit outhouses of 1980s rural Korea.

And even that reeked to high heaven and crawled with flies.

"Chief of Staff Isabella."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"We launched the Saemaul Undong, and reality still isn't keeping pace."

Isabella answered with an awkward expression.

"It appears we'll need more time yet."

"......"

I bit down hard on my lip.

'Guess I'll just have to push a little harder.'

I gripped the village chief's hand tightly and spoke as if making a vow.

"Sir, I give you my word. Two years from now at the latest, I'll have this village wired for electricity and the taps running with clean water. I'll build a health clinic too, so anyone who falls ill can see a doctor right away. So until then, you have to stay healthy. Promise me."

"Your Excellency... bwuhuhuh! Thank you!"

Watching the village chief weep, I clenched my fist.

*

Carrying that heavy heart with me, the second place I visited was a small village perched on a mountainside about an hour from the first.

This place was every bit as poor as the last, but the atmosphere was strangely different.

"His Excellency has come!"

The moment I stepped out of the car, the villagers lined up along both sides of the road.

That much, fine, I could understand.

Thud. Thud.

"......?!"

The people who laid eyes on me suddenly started dropping to their knees, of all things.

And not just kneeling, either. They pressed their palms together and bowed their heads low.

"Ohh... O hero who saved our nation... O Yu-jin who watches over us and holds us close..."

The muttering had an ominous ring to it.

Then, led by the village chief into the heart of the village, I witnessed a truly appalling sight.

Right in the middle, in the most visible spot, an altar had been set up.

At the center of the candlelit altar hung a framed photograph of me in a suit, and in front of it stood a stone statue of a very familiar figure.

"Is that... me?"

The village chief said proudly,

"Yes! Morning and night, our village sets out an offering of water for Your Excellency and prays for your long life and good health, for our village... and for the glory of San Marcos beyond it."

"Why...?"

"Ever since we enshrined Your Excellency's photograph, the epidemics vanished from the village and the harvest came in bigger than ever! And there are households where someone dreamed of Your Excellency and was cured of their sickness as if it had been wiped clean away!"

"......"

I was at a loss for words.

'Is this for real?'

I was flooded with bewilderment.

The president of a democratic nation, made the object of a folk faith.

When I saw the look in the villagers' eyes, the eyes of people who'd earnestly prayed to the me in that photograph, a chill ran down my spine.

"...What's going on here?"

"They appear to be followers of the Church of Yu-jin."

"The Church of... Yu-jin?"

"Yes. A new religion that's been spreading through the provinces lately. It worships Your Excellency as a god."

"No, hold on."

Why the hell were they enshrining me as the god of some cult.

"Isabella."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"Find a way to stamp out this Church of Yu-jin. This really won't do. I'm a politician, not a god."

I'd pulled Isabella aside to say it quietly, but she shook her head.

"The thing is... that would be difficult right now."

"What? Why? I'd think a simple public statement would do the trick."

"Even if we ban the practice of worshipping Your Excellency as a god, there's no guarantee they'll comply, and enforcement won't be easy. On top of that, one wrong move could trigger all sorts of side effects."

"...I think I'm going to need that explained."

"For instance, suppose we did outlaw the Church of Yu-jin. If some other cult sprang up to fill the vacuum, the harm it could do would be beyond words. And the citizens whose religion we'd banned would be furious with the government, no question about it."

She definitely wasn't wrong.

With religion, falling into it is the hard part; once someone's fallen in, climbing back out is the real struggle.

Cults don't thrive for nothing.

When I nodded, Isabella offered a suggestion.

"Why not just leave it be, instead? If they're worshipping Your Excellency, the nation's supreme leader, perhaps we could regard it less as faith and more as political support."

"Hmm... I suppose there's no helping it. For now, let's leave it alone. But keep a close watch so it doesn't spread."

"Yes, understood."

It was the kind of problem that would fade on its own once the whole population's education levels rose.

Just as Isabella said, there seemed to be no point in poking a hornet's nest.

There was just one thing, though.

'If I fail, their whole world comes crashing down too.'

If I didn't want to let these people down, I'd have to pull off an honest-to-god miracle.

'Actually, the smart play here is to use this situation.'

I nodded and clasped the village chief's hand in both of mine.

"Village Chief. For the prayers to land better, the villagers need to be healthy. So from now on, I'd like you to pay special attention to everyone's health. If anyone falls ill, report it to the field office right away and see that they get treatment."

"I'll keep it in mind, Your Excellency!"

I took the hands of every last one of them, one by one, the village chief weeping with emotion and the villagers right alongside him.

***

Yu-jin's next campaign stop turned out, unexpectedly, to be a highway construction site.

On the way to the next village, Yu-jin had spotted the site and decided on the spot.

KA-BOOM-!

With a massive blast, a chunk of the mountainside was sheared away.

Amid the pale clouds of dirt billowing up like smoke, hundreds of pieces of heavy machinery rumbled and roared into motion.

"Heave! Push it!"

"Hey, you! Tie that rebar properly, would you?! You're gonna cause an accident!"

"Bring it over here! Move it, move it!"

Thousands of laborers swarmed the place like a colony of ants, hauling stones and packing down the earth.

Their faces were caked with sweat and grime, but their eyes, at least, were alive.

Most of them came from poor provincial stock, people who'd found a new life at the worksites Yu-jin had created.

Into that fierce arena of life rolled a procession of black jeeps.

Screech.

The vehicles halted, and as the dust settled, a door swung open and Yu-jin stepped out.

"Huh?"

The site manager, who happened to be directing work nearby, rubbed his eyes.

He wasn't seeing things.

Yu-jin was shaking off his attendants' protests and striding straight into the rough heart of the construction yard.

"Gah!"

Startled out of his skin, the site manager came scrambling over.

"Y-Your Excellency! What brings you here with no warning...?"

"My apologies for interrupting your work, manager."

Yu-jin smiled warmly and shook the manager's hand.

"I was passing by and saw our people working so hard, and I just couldn't bring myself to drive on. While I'm here, might I take a moment to meet them, campaign and all?"

"O-of course! I'll have them assembled at once!"

The manager immediately put a whistle to his lips and blew with all his might.

TWEEEEET-!

"All work, stop! One-hour break! Everyone, gather over here!"

At the foremen's shouts, the din of the machinery ground to a halt.

The laborers, murmuring among themselves and wondering what was going on, went wide-eyed the instant they spotted Yu-jin.

"I-it's His Excellency!"

"His Excellency came all the way out here!"

"Whoa!"

As they came surging forward, the bodyguards tensed and moved to hold them back.

But Yu-jin raised a hand to wave them off and, without a moment's hesitation, plunged into the crowd of workers.

"You've all been working so hard."

When Yu-jin held out his hand to the laborer standing at the front, the man flustered and stumbled backward.

"Y-Your Excellency... my hands are filthy..."

"It's fine."

Yu-jin seized the burly man's hand without flinching.

And shook it firmly.

"Aren't these the glorious marks of a man who's labored for his homeland?"

"Ah...!"

The man's eyes welled red.

Yu-jin didn't stop there. He met each man's eyes, one after another, and offered his hand in turn.

The stench of sweat hung thick and dust swirled through the air, but he didn't mind in the slightest.

This went on for a bit. Before long, a crowd of thousands had encircled him.

Yu-jin glanced around, then strode up onto a large boulder nearby.

"Everyone! You've worked so hard! It's been grueling, hasn't it?!"

At his booming voice, the noisy site fell silent as if doused with cold water, and then.

"WOOOOAAAH!!!"

A thunderous roar erupted.

"The reason I've come here today is to bow my head before your toil!"

Yu-jin pointed to the road carved out beneath his feet and raised his voice.

"This road you're carving open right now with your blood and sweat is no ordinary road!"

The laborers' eyes followed to the horizon at the far end of the road he'd indicated.

"It is the brilliant future of the nation your children will live in!"

At Yu-jin's words, the laborers' hearts caught fire.

"I promise you this. I will never let the blood and sweat you've shed go to waste!"

Yu-jin clenched his fist and bellowed as if roaring.

"I, Choi Yu-jin, will lead this country into the future and build a world where your children can chase their dreams to their hearts' content! A nation where poverty is not handed down, a nation where anyone who works hard can prosper! Let us build it together!"

"WOOOOAAAH!!!"

As his speech ended, the site turned into a veritable cauldron of frenzy.

"¡Viva Yu-jin! ¡Viva San Marcos!"

The eyes of the laborers cheering up at Yu-jin brimmed with blind devotion.

*****

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