The People's Democratic Party in the Media
San Corenzo's first "First Lady" was born in a three-room shack on August 17 1988.
Alberta Benes was the youngest of six brothers and sisters growing up in an financially deprived area of the island. When she was ten years of age, she was employed as a waitress at one of several failing resorts established in an attempt to inject tourist income into the islands agrarian economy. In one of the few interviews she permitted during her later years, she described her job as follows:
To call it humiliation would be to lie - I was worse than humiliated. I like a servant, or a slave. I was small and weak, abject and prostrate: not before the rich of the world, but the petty rich! Flabby Americans, Mexicans, each of them vaguely disappointed with the indifferent squalor of my home.
I kept that job. I stayed there, and cleaned their tables, and smiled. But then, they `discovered' the Datura. That was the end of it. Drunken engineers, lawyers, and managers came. Drunken reporters, whores, and workers came.
I remember the first night we were held up. The owner was amazed. He had never thought anyone would try to take his money; why should he? He had never had any money before the foreigners came to by the island under our feet. The robber was young and nervous, and as he was trying to flee with his stolen money, he tripped over his own feet, and nearly shot me with is rifle. I could have killed him; he had taken our money, and nearly killed us! But later I thought to myself: the money he stole was not ours; it came from the Datura, and the Datura, even though it would only grow in our soil was not ours: these foreigners, it had become their plant. It was their money that had drawn the robber to us.
Later in the interview, Benes described this incident as critical in her decision to seek independence for her homeland as a one of several co-founders of the People's Democratic Party of San Corenzo.
Despite her relative obscurity during the party's early years, some historians claim that Benes had some influence in the party's strategic planning, including a possible co-authorship of such documents as the International Open Pledge. To date, no adequate evidence has been presented to support this rather extreme claim. All impartial writings in fact confirm the interpretation that her primary path to fame was as the wife of Pedro Menor, and First Lady of San Corenzo during his presidency.
Benes and Menor were married during the Party's "underground" period, some time during the February of 2017.
The People's Democratic Party in the Media
The People's Democratic Republic of San Corenzo
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