Pedro Marquez

Pedro Marquez was born in South America, where he went to college and attended several exchange programs to universities in nations across South America.

It was during his college years that he realized that the people of South America all shared a common Latin ancestry, mostly obvious through their languages. The region he grew up in was dominated by Brazilian Portuguese and Hispanic people, with a minority of French speakers and, to a lesser extent, Italian speakers.

Marquez majored in Political Studies and soon became very active in government in his home nation. During his required military service, he met and married Victoria Lucinda Ramirez, a cadet officer intent on joining the artillery divisions. Victoria soon became fascinated by Pedro's ideal of a unified Latin state.

Pedro formed a new political party in South America based off his ideals. Known as the Union Party, by 1990 the party had gathered enough influence in the region to organize a very loose governing coalition for the five surrounding independent provinces. Based in the prosperous city of Cuiabá, this early government, known during those ten years as the Provincial Forum, initally held very little sway over the five provinces. At first Marquez was content to sit by as a regional delegate from his homeland, but he was frustrated by the Forum's ineffectiveness as a unifying body. He was determined not to be swept under the carpet by the provincial governments, nor to allow the separating lines of ethnicity, religion, language, or sexuality dominate politics. In 1993 Marquez began a region-wide campaign for true unification under one central government, in order to show the people and the world that unity was possible despite all divisions. He drew upon the prevailing Latin ethnic identity of the region to spur support for his movement and led innumerable rallies across the region until the Union Party's influence peaked in 1998. At this point, Marquez and his associates drafted a constitution that would dissolve the Provincial Forum and replace it with a centralized federal government that would override the provinces and strip them of their individual sovereignty. The provincial governments suffered from region-wide domestic pressure to ratify the constitution. In order to ease their minds and dispel a sense of antagonism, Marquez guaranteed all provincial leaders and lawmakers that they would retain positions in the new government. This was further aided by the significant lack of national identity or patriotism in the five provinces.

Still, the constitution took some time for all provinces to ratify. It formally came into effect on September 18th, 2004, solidifying the five provinces into a fully recognizable nation-state in 2004, making Cuiabá into the capital city of the new Incorporated States of the Latin Union. The former members of provincial lawmaking bodies relocated to Cuiabá to become the bulk of the brand-new Latin General Assembly. Power was centralized in Cuiabá, and many aspects of provincial government were limited or liquidated.

Marquez was elected unanimously by the General Assembly to be the first President of the Latin Union. He would have preferred a direct popular vote, but after polls showed his approval rating was nearly 95%, he relented and accepted the position. He selected noted statesman Felipe Caraguez to be his Vice President, and together the two were granted electoral amnesty by the General Assembly, allowing them to serve their first two five-year terms without need to run for reelection, a measure the Assembly deemed necessary to ensure the stability of the new nation. Again, Marquez was against this move, and insisted that there be free general elections in 2009. The issue remains unsettled, and is periodically debated on the floor of the Assembly.

Upon his ascendance to the Presidency, Marquez professed the creation of a Latin state as just one more step towards world unity. He promised the people of the nation that he would work his hardest to forge strong ties with their neighbors, and work especially hard through the United Nations to draw the world community together in peace and prosperity. His major focuses, besides stabilizing the Latin Union, lie in controlling the flow of illegal narcotics within his nation, and decreasing poverty and unemployment.