This one probably isn’t as interesting, although it’s been useful.
The Boss Lady (2102-2113)
President Martinez was not an idealist, and never presented herself as one. She was instead a born technocrat who despised the lack of feedback and accountability that had been increasing features of the Lewis regime. Martinez saw nothing particularly wrong with the idea of being effectively a ruling queen, as long as she was being given correct information and the ability to quickly fix mistakes. Neither was she adverse to the transportation process, as long as it was exiling the right people. And as long as it was only exiling people discriminately. The PLC and Coexisters had been running too wild, for too long.
Domestically, Martinez had three goals. The first was arranging matters so that the Extended States gained the same representation in Congress as the Original States. Privately, Martinez felt that the goal was meaningless — Congress did not significantly regain any power during her time in office — but it was becoming a matter of some importance to the hispanic half of the USNA. Second, Martinez permitted (and indeed quietly encouraged) opposition parties to flourish, solely because the Dynamic Party had ironically become a bloated, inefficient mess over the last few decades of single-party rule. Lewis might have wanted potential rivals to be dumb, fat, and happy, but then Lewis wanted to be carried out of the Oval Office, feet-first.
And that was Martinez’s third goal: to be able to serve two full terms, and then safely leave. She was familiar with history. Dictators almost never got to retire, and even monarchs had difficulty abdicating. Presidents left office all the time.
Foreign policy was much easier. The creation of Grande Brasil in 2102 had finally ended the Consolidation Wars, not that anyone realized it at the time (or that the endless worldwide conflicts that had killed a quarter of a billion people over a quarter-century would someday be lumped together). That made it possible for deal-making. West Europe was amenable to trading land in South America in exchange for Greenland (and a blind eye to the takeover of Iceland). She also signed the first trade agreements with the South East Defensive Association, which later led to cordial relations between the two Great Powers, and their long standing alliance on the new Adjudication Council (formed in 2109). The Martinez administration also formalized relations with the other Great Powers, while extricating the USNA from the last of the international obligations and understandings left over from its predecessor. For better or worse — Americans were evenly divided on which — the era of American world hegemony was over.
President Martinez did not run for reelection in 2112, instead peacefully handing power over to President Troy Gardner. She spent the rest of her life in comfortable retirement, occasionally performing diplomatic missions on the behalf of the USNA government. She wrote no memoirs, kept no diaries, made sure that any stories about her were kept as innocuous as possible — and gave as few interviews as she could.
Maria Martinez died at home in her Veracruz estate on Jun 12, 2145, at the age of eighty-seven. At her request, her state funeral was held in her home city, which had grown to be the working capital of the USNA. By then the country could fairly be called something like an actual functioning democracy, albeit one with a remarkably powerful executive, and an ongoing need for Reform. The older outrages of the Lewis regime were gone, but not quite forgotten, and certainly never really apologized for. They happened, and that was the end of the matter.
And throughout all this time, freer country or not, the flow of involuntary colonists never quite stopped flowing.
