My father was not highly pleased with the plan. Especially the part about his family being in very real and extreme danger for the foreseeable future. He had a point, but our goal was nothing short of true and lasting world peace. Not to mention saving Earth from eventual destruction at the hands of advanced alien raiders. Wasn't that worth the risk of being kidnapped, tortured, and killed by drug lords?
Maybe it doesn't sound so good when I put it like that, but in my eyes, the risk was small. First, we'd stay hidden, our identities unknown for quite a while into the plan. Second, we could always retreat into the Super-Secret Planetary Leadership Headquarters Treehouse Fortress, which was not only completely invisible, but virtually impregnable to any Earth weapon a drug lord could acquire. I should look into expanding the living quarters, I thought.
In the end, we agreed that while we would go forward with charitable efforts, we wouldn't proceed with anything beyond planning and monitoring criminal activities until Mom was fully informed. Neither of us was looking forward to that!
Worth mentioning here, is that it takes a considerable amount of time to get physical products from one point to another in the galaxy, the jump was really quick, but ships had to accelerate to a pretty high percentage of lightspeed with reaction engines to make the jump, then accelerate from a dead stop (relative to their jump exit position) to move to their destination. Jump re-entry had to be far from a gravity well or the ship would be torn apart. The distance from a gravity well was related to the length of the jump. So, a Local Interdimensional Transport Vehicle (LITV), like Earth Friend's 'car' or my transport booth could jump a little more than two light seconds, starting or ending even directly on the surface of a planet of Earth's mass. Because of the short travel distance, 'ambient' motion was enough to move the vehicle spatially within the jump, meaning reaction drives weren't necessary at all.
However, with a properly capable fabrication mech, most things could be built, molecule by molecule, or even atom by atom if necessary, locally. Information like plans and licensing fees could be transmitted instantaneously. While we still had to pay even if we built the item locally, it removed the delay between ordering and arrival as well as the huge extra expense of physical transport. Which is why I had a separate small fabrication mech sent to the Earth System along with the industrial machines being used in Jupiter Orbit to build the refueling station. From Jupiter orbit, it had to be sent in a small reaction drive transport, which I had also purchased.
Once it was here, I could set it to building anything, including a family-sized addition to the living quarters of the Headquarters. That took less than a day, along with some other minor changes to the facility. Then, I sent the unit to our warehouse in Sacapulas using my LITV transport booth. We hired a law firm in the country to help with necessary permitting for our charitable agency, Food First and to act on our behalf buying real estate.
Sacapulas, Guatemala
We purchased an existing building in Sacapulas, between Route 7 and Calle Central right around the corner from a local restaurant called Comedor Karina. We hired a warehouse manager from the area, he had spent some time working in the United States and spoke English well, as well as Spanish and K'iche', a local Mayan tongue. We built a huge dummy machine with a conveyor belt at one end that could feed material in, and another at the far end that delivered finished products. A realistic computerized control panel allegedly controlled the whole thing "set it and forget it" style. In reality, our tiny fabrication mech, less than two feet wide, and equally tall, handled everything with commands relayed from Joe at Headquarters or from the Operations Room if I wanted to handle it personally. We made a large food synthesizer, with the goal that it would pump out nixtamal (a kind of corn dough used throughout Central and South America to make traditional tortillas), finished tortillas, rice, various types of beans, maize, potatoes, various other fruits and vegetables in quantity. Since none of these were off-world licensed products we only had to pay a royalty for each use of the synthesizer itself.
Our first problem was how to make free food available in quantity without destroying the prices for farmers and local producers, and restaurants like Comedor Karina, our neighbor. Our goal was not to replace local farmers or drive them out of business, but to make sure everyone got fed. We quickly decided we were on the wrong path.
Instead of producing food directly, we decided to help local farmers grow more with less work. The first thought was chemical fertilizers, but we didn't want to deplete other soil nutrients and develop a dependency on added fertilizer. We could do pesticides and disease prevention, but were reluctant to add chemicals to the local ecosystem and the varieties they were growing were already quite hardy. We could offer genetically modified seeds with higher crop yields, but again, we didn't want to mess with the local ecosystem or change the traditional flavors, textures, and colors that defined Mayan crops.
So, in the end, we did two things, we looked at foods that were imported and we looked at the processing of local produce into finished dishes. We offered to take raw corn from farmers, dry it, nixtamalize it, and create nixtamal or finished tamales for them. We used the synthesizer to increase the output yield to almost double what would have resulted from the materials put in and we charged a pittance for our service. We even hired local drivers with trucks or tuk-tuks to go pick up the corn and return the finished products to the farmers for a cost-only additional fee. This had the effect of instantly doubling the yield for every maize field in the area as long as they brought their corn to us.
We offered to use our delivery trucks to help the farmers sell any excess in bulk to commercial buyers in the cities, so long as ten percent was reserved to feed the hungry in the poorest villages throughout Huehuetenango and Quiche' districts. We made sure to mark all of our trucks and delivery vehicles with magnetic signs with the name of our charitable organization in English "Food First." In Spanish "Comida Primero," and the Mayan K'ichi' language equivalent "Ya'ik wa kik'il" which was closer to "Together we give food." I actually liked the message of the Mayan translation better, as it fit our end goal more appropriately.
We used our low-flying surveillance to watch over our delivery vehicles. We had one that off-loaded the cargo at a house before reaching his destination, then telling us it was stolen from the back of his pick-up. We had an invisible drone place a sign on the stolen goods saying this was his one free gift, but it should not happen again, and we put a map on the windshield of his truck showing the location where he had dropped off the stolen goods, and a photo of the house in question, with his fully loaded truck parked outside.
Neither he nor our people ever mentioned it again, but he never missed a delivery after that. Maybe other drivers heard about it, maybe they didn't. Either way, none of them ever tried anything like that after that day. For the time being, we avoided deliveries to or from areas where we knew we'd run into trouble with the criminal enterprises we had been monitoring.
Super-Secret Planetary Leadership Headquarters Treehouse Fortress
Our finances in Galactic Credits were stretched thin, beyond thin. We had debts for the things we'd already purchased in excess of the earnings we received. Once the refueling station came online and our construction repayments were completed, we'd be in a much better place. I licensed bananas and all the permutations of banana flavoring to the Galactic Union marketplace via our trading partnership. It was well received, but it wasn't as popular as coffee or chocolate which had proven to be home runs with a large loyal customer bases providing steady revenue streams. I'd need more tactical equipment soon for the Guatemala operation, and that would take GU credits. It also occurred to me that commercial products like Coca-Cola or Pepsi might be offered at the GU level, but I'd have to figure out the revenue sharing side of that, as I had yet to do with copyrighted literary works.
As far as Earth-based currency we had plenty. Joe could mine crypto faster than you could say crypto-currency and only limited himself so as not to disrupt the market. Furthermore, it was perfectly legal. Generating block-chain codes just went much faster when one used alien quantum computing power to do it.
As part of the overall plan, we'd soon begin electronically diverting funds from the drug cartels and their associates to disrupt their finances and make them fight among themselves. The time wasn't right, but soon.