Palacio de San Telmo, Seville, Andalusia, 21st December 1981...:
General Arquillo was sitting down in his brand-new office in the Palacio de San Telmo (OOC: In real life, it's where the Andalusian Autonomous Government's President has his office) after being named successor to the post of Chief of State and of Government in the Last Will and Testament of the recently deceased José Roberto, who had himself taken the chair after Francisco Franco's death. His first measure had been to declare a three-day-mourning period and a State Funeral for General Roberto, to be held in Seville's Saint Mary's Cathedral after the mourning period, during which his body would lay in a glass-covered casket in the Alcázar, much in the way Franco's had been several years ago.
General Manuel Arquillo had been born in Jaén in the 1930s, back when Andalusia was still a part of Spain, a country that, during his life, had expanded after accepting Portugal and France into his territory during the reign of King Alfonso XIII, and had then been dislodged in pieces after the Third World War, in which the enormous Bourbon Empire made the mistake to attack the Germans on the back, resulting in the nations of Castile, Euskadi, Catalonia and Andalusia being formed and France and Portugal being given independence. He had joined the Andalusian Army shortly after the division had been made, believing that his future was in there, helping the country to survive after the separation from the Madre Patria. It had paid off, and, having been one of the few officers to be sent to the United States of America for training in new strategies of warring, he had raised within the ranks of the army rather fast, until reaching the position of Minister of War under Roberto's governance.
However, as much as he liked the fact that it had been the army what had helped him reach this position, he felt that the country needed a chance to express itself and ask for a capable leader that they felt would be able to take care of the problems in the country. During his stay in West Point Academy (through an agreement between Andalusia and the USA, several Andalusian officers had been allowed to attend the famous military academy), he had been amazed at the freedom of speech everybody assumed as a right, speaking without fear of their opinion of the government and of many other subjects that, in Andalusia, would have sent you to prison at least for a few months. He had really liked it. And now that he was the ruler in the country, he would be able to apply those ideas in the mindset of the people.
It would have to be a slow process, he knew, because many in the army were too used to the fact that it was them who made the law in Andalusia, the upper classes feared that any kind of rights given to everybody as a whole would spell ruin for them, and the lower classes would either react with apathy (as it had been said by a famous philosopher, the people who haven't lived in liberty aren't able to ask for it) or they would revolt in order to ask for far more changes than the Government or the Army would support, and then it would be either a civil war or a continuous revolt from the lower classes: either of them would give Castile in the north the possibility to invade and finally reuniting the former Spain into one country.
Fortunately, he could count with the help of several officers that would also support the slow introduction of democracy in the country. For example, he had Antonio Tejero, a Lieutenant a bit older than him from Málaga who also believed that the foundation of a democracy would work well in Andalusia (OOC: IRL, Tejero was one of the heads of the attempt of coup d'état of the 23rd February 1981). Miguel Primo de Rivera was also an able admiral (OOC: this is supposed to be the grandson of Miguel Primo de Rivera, a Mussolini-like dictator during the 1920s, and nephew to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange Nacional party, which would be the core of the Movimiento Nacional party that ruled Spain with Francisco Franco (a Galician, hee) on its head. Miguel was born in Santander, but I think it would work better if he was born in Cádiz, like his grandfather), and his most prized friend and advisor, Colonel Juan Antonio Rojo, whom he had met when he was doing the military service and had become with time in one of his best friends, even as he stayed in the army and Juan Antonio (or Juanan, as he liked to be called) went to the recently created Andalusian Air Force. The relationship between the two families had been very close: why, his daughter Maria was going to marry Juanan's nephew Antonio just in a few months!
Manuel sighed, and kept reading the informs that declared the literacy level between the population was hardly over the 70%, and only a fourth of that knew something more than to read, write and the four rules (add, rest, multiply and divide). While the literacy numbers were above that of several countries in the world, Manuel knew that, in order to prosper, a nation had to start at the base: he himself had known how much it paid to study a lot, and his daughters María and Carmen had earned their Ph.D.s in Mathematics and Biology through a lot of hard work. That was why he was going to raise the funding for the nation's schools. He just hoped that the lowering of money dedicated to police enforcement wouldn't cause any problems...
OOC: I hope that you put this in the update, EQ, I spent way too much time trying to create this story. Also I would like you to answer that PM I sent you some time ago. I'll send my orders when I know as much as I can about the current state of Andalusia.
IC:
From: General Manuel Arquillo, Chief of the Andalusian Government.
To: The World.
Greetings to all the leaders of the world! I, General Arquillo, the recently instated Chief of the Andalusian State, salute you, and hope that the wars that plagued our world for so much time don't resume and lay waste to the land we inhabit! (OOC: Translation: Please, don't go and start WWV, I am already a bit sick of the other four!) We would also like to state our wish that a new United Nations is established in order to make as much as possible in regards to peace.
From: Andalusia.
To: the other members of the MEC, especially the African ones.
We feel that the presence of the OBP Corporation in our territories might - I said MIGHT - help our economies raise even faster than they would do alone. It's my believe that there are great quantities of oil in North Africa, as it happens in many deserts around the world, so if we present a common front and manage to get a good deal, we might free ourselves from the stranglehold the BIN or the UFS would put on us should they get angry with us (OOC: I nearly said the CPO, but since they aren't mentioned in the first posts, I'd wager that they don't exist). This is not an insult towards those two nations (in fact, we are grateful as the former USA have been great allies of our small nation ever since its conception), but I am still pointing out that the possibility exists.
From: General Manuel Arquillo of Andalusia.
To: President Ronald Reagan of the UFS.
Even though our nation didn't wish to be part of the Union of Federated States, it doesn't mean that we are suddenly American- or English-haters, we just felt that we wouldn't be enough represented in the House of Representatives as our population is much less than that of the UFS, even without counting the people from the CLS that recently separated (418M vs 8M). In spite of this, we would be glad to sign a trade agreement with your gigantic nation, and we offer to host any peace accords between the UFS and the CLS, be it to formalize separation between the two nations or to sign the rejoining of the two nations into the one it was hardly a few years before the Lindbergh Papers were discovered. However, we hope it's clear that in no way we support such facts as the ones described in said papers, and neither we will support in a military fashion either of the two nations: our army is hardly big enough to do something in a place thousands of kilometres away from here! Also, is there any chance that the Canary Islands can be given back to Andalusia, as the Azores were given back to Portugal?