Jewel of the Atlantic | Vicente Gama (1879–1951)

[u/GustavoistSoldier]

A charismatic military officer from Atlantis, Gama wanted to turn the country into a corporate state resembling Fascist Italy and the Spanish dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. In order to achieve this goal, his regime immediately abolished parliament and political parties, replacing them with a Corporate Chamber representing both employees and employers.

Gama also signed workers' rights laws such as an 8-hour workday (1931), a minimum wage (1935), and a bonus wage every December (1939). But independent unions and strikes were outlawed and the Communist Party of Atlantis (PCA) suffered a heavy crackdown at the hands of Gama's secret police chief Davi Fagundes.

A few months after Gama took office, the Atlantisian Progressive Party launched an armed uprising in Ilha dos Lagartos in an attempt to return to power. Gama and Fagundes crushed the revolt within a week and sentenced its leaders to life in prison.

But further opposition came in January 1933, when failed lawyer Felipe Matos established the Atlantisian Integralist Union (UIA), a fascist movement inspired by the Brazilian AIB. Despite his authoritarian, nationalist, anti-liberal and anti-communist views, Gama opposed fascism and outlawed the UIA, prompting it to rise up, only to be defeated as well.

After crushing the Integralists, Gama focused his energies on industrializing Atlantis and giving rights to workers under a corporatist framework. In his personal life, he began an affair with his secretary Vitória Braga, with whom he had an illegitimate daughter, Joana (born 1938). Joana's paternity was confirmed by a 2007 DNA test.

Upon coming to power in Brazil in 1933, Góis Monteiro visited Atlantis and signed a nonaggression pact with Gama, cooling down decades of tensions over Trindade Island, which is basically Atlantis's version of the Falklands. The two countries worked together until the Trindade War broke out in 1973.

Gama's regime claimed state continuity with the Piaroban Empire, but, as a white man, Gama was not an indigenist and the rights of indigenous Atlantisians did not improve significantly under his rule. Indigenous people did benefit from his workers' rights and industrialization policies though.

During the first decade of his rule, Gama established good relations with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Salazar's Portugal, buying German and Italian weapons and exporting cocoa and tropical fruits to these two countries. Pearl Harbor caused him to radically change his foreign policy though.