The National Government of El Cargotá
Name: Chaupi Allccarima Huanca-Hidalgo
Position in government: Prosecutor-General (Minister of Justice)
Political Party: Indigenous Front
Race: Quechua
Religion: Catholic
Gender: Female
Age: 52
General Political Ideology: Huanca-Hidalgo is of the opinion that the history of El Cargotá is a history of violence and injustice towards her people. From early colonisation, to post-independence governments, to the 20th century pro-US governments, every time her people had to play second-fiddle to the peninsulares. While slavery was outlawed in the early 19th century, her people were still subject to countless legal and extralegal discriminations. Legal discrimination was outlawed in the 70s, but even then almost 400 years of second-rate citizenship left its mark. Indigenous people control less wealth, own less land and own fewer businesses and positions of power than other groups in the nation. In the eyes of Huanca-Hidalgo, equality can only be achieved if reparations for past discrimination are made.
As a result, Huanca-Hidalgo promotes a socialist agenda. Massive investments in infrastructure and education will be necessary, as well as land redistribution and better representation in the nation’s positions of power. The criminal justice system requires reforming as well, since it has long been an institution of oppression against the Quechua indigenous groups. Apart from purging systematic racism from the institution, she also seeks to promote investigations into baking fraud, organised drug crime and industrial pollution, since her own people have the most to lose from these forms of crime. On the other side, she wants to put less resources towards investigating social service fraud and petty crime, as she sees those as less of a priority for the good of the nation. This is probably the biggest criticism of her tenure, as many low-level offences are now punished with fines or community service instead of jail time.
Character intentions: Huanca-Hidalgo wants to keep reforming the justice system until it lives up to her expectations of the system. That means a sufficient representation (30%) of Quechua among her prosecutors and other staff, as well as a proper prosecution of crimes that does not involve racist assumptions of guilt. However, despite the criticism of her opponents, she does not look to shield Quechua from criminal responsibility. However, she views the higher crime statistics among Quechua as representative of their poverty, and not some inherent criminality, and she seeks to follow that in her prosecutorial decisions.
Apart from her anti-racist programs, she also seeks to prosecute financial fraud and other white-collar crimes harsher than it had been prosecuted before. This includes government corruption, which she tries her best to clamp down on. However, this is where she has gotten the most pushback from the president. The current government promotes corruption at least tangentially, and the other ministers and party backers hate seeing their friends locked up. Huanca-Hidalgo does her best within that broken system, but there is only so much she can do. More than once, she contemplated resigning, but she does not want to lose her position of power to be replaced by one of the president’s lackeys. As a firm believer in the rule of law, she would never want to prosecute political opponents, but she has not yet figured out if she would prioritise if the president asked her to.
Biography: Huanca-Hidalgo was born to Yurak Amaru Huanca, a local priest and civil rights defender, and Mercedes Hidalgo-Murillo, a well-known human rights lawyer. She was a bastard, being born outside of wedlock due to the expected celibacy of her father. While Yurak’s and Mercedes’ relationship was an open secret, the two feared that their daughter would present their enemies with too much ammunition against their cause. So, their daughter was kept a secret, which would fundamentally shape her view of the world. She learnt to see herself as second-place next to the Cause, and looked up to her parents because of it. She could never tell anyone that she was their daughter, from the time she entered grade school until the present day.
Her path in life was laid out before her. She would do well in school (earning a firm scolding from both of her parents if she didn’t live up to their high expectations), she would go to university to study law, and she would become a lawyer in her mother’s firm. While she was helped along the way, or because she was helped along the way, her parents drove her to go ever-further, ever-faster. She had little time for friends, going out, anything else than constant studying. And she praised her parents for it.
She was 20 when she had her first breakdown. Her studies, her various clubs, her reading list of important literature and her job on the side finally caught up with her. While openly supportive, she could not help but feeling that she had disappointed her parents, and especially her father. So, when she recovered, she strove even harder. She joined the union, and joined in their protests. She rose up the ranks, being treasurer as well as a student. She kept that up until her 26th, when she became a lawyer in her mother’s firm. She had her second breakdown a year in, forcing her to drop her work for the union. Again, she could taste the disapproval and the disappointment of her parents. When she got out of hospital (she had hurt herself during a vicious panic attack), she strove herself further again.
During the 80s, some Andes-bound indigenous separatists got into contact with the Soviet Union. In order to divert American attention to Latin America, the Soviets began funding these groups, both through funnelling of funds and by buying up drugs produced by these groups. These groups used those funds to buy weapons, either from the Soviet Union or from Colombian drug gangs. The entire Quechuan ethnicity was blamed by some circles, especially the nationalists, and a violent campaign of unofficial repression started. Police presence in majority-Quechua cities was increased, which led to an arms race between police forces and drug dealers, which the locals caught in the crossfire. The collapse of the Soviet Union stopped this violence, but police repression continued. The groups surrendered in the late 90s, with the government promising amnesty. However, in the early 2000s, the government started prosecuting former separatists, threatening them with capital punishment. Huanca-Hidalgo and her mother had to defend these people in court, something that did not garner them much popularity.
However, it did make them popular in the eyes of Quechuan indigenous groups. Based on this popularity, Huanca-Hidalgo became a talking head for indigenous groups in the late 2000s, promoting justice reform and indigenous problems. She became a member of the Indigenous Front, which had been purged of its problematic and separatist past. She was elected to parliament in 2012, when the party gave support to the majority government under the social democrats. In 2016, the support of the Indigenous Front became indispensable, and the president was forced to accept Huanca-Hidalgo as Prosecutor-General in order to keep his coalition in line.
Her tenure in office saw some far-reaching reforms. Prosecutorial guidelines were thrown out and rewritten wholesale, and various divisions aimed at fighting crime among indigenous groups were disbanded. In their place came bureaus to fight tax evasion, corporate fraud and environmental pollution. Her office issued massive fines to companies for union-busting, using underpaid labour and failing to issue environmental impact reports. Her fight against real estate fraud brought her in hot water with her own coalition partners, however. The corruption in local governments was the biggest obstacle in fighting real estate fraud, but there were many ‘protected individuals’ she was now allowed to prosecute by her government. This caused her fourth breakdown, leaving the ministry in charge of her deputy for a month while she recovered. However, when she had recovered, she decided not to push the issue, but to do her work as well as the government allowed it. In secret, she keeps a secret record with all confirmed cases of corruption, so that when the time comes, she will be able to prosecute her way through the corrupt quagmire of local government.