Zianya Xcaret

Zianya Xcaret
Zianya Xcaret in 2022
Tepachoani of Zacapican
Incumbent
Assumed office 1 August 2022
Vice President	Mocel Zohuamizton
Preceded by	Ortenzo Quetzal
In office 31 July 2018 – 1 August 2020
Vice President	Yucetizi Icniuhtli
Preceded by	Moctezuma Necalini
Succeeded by	Ortenzo Quetzal
Ixiptlatl of Angatahuaca District 11
In office 14 December 2010 – 20 July 2015
Preceded by	Xochiquen Yemac
Succeeded by	Tizamitl Coatlaca
Speaker of the Macehualque Party
Incumbent
Assumed office 25 April 2016
Preceded by	Xiomara Dailan
Personal details
Born	Zianya Mizilama Xcaret (1979-07-24)24 July 1979 Angatahuaca, Aztaco Republic, Zacapican
Political party	Macehualque
Spouse(s)	Metzal Zancopinca (m. 2002; div. 2009)
Signature
Military service
Allegiance	Zacapican
Branch/service	Aztaco Republican Guard
Years of service	1998–2006
Rank	Captain

Zianya Mizilama Xcaret (born 24 July 1979) is a politician and stateswoman currently serving her third term as the Tepachoani of Zacapican. She has held office since 2020 with the current being her second consecutive term, prior to which she served another term from 2016 to 2018 as well as a five year term as one of the Ixiptlatl representatives for her native Angatahuaca between 2010 and 2015. As the leader of the Macehualque party, one of the three major parties of the Zacapine democracy, she is highly influential within the world of Zacapine politics and the apparatus of the executive branch of the national government. Zianya Xcaret has been described as a populist and a progressive, although she rejects both of these labels in favor of describing herself as a "true democrat". In the public discourse, she is most well known as the Liquidator Tepachoani because of her role in the remediation forces responding to the Xochitlalpan nuclear disaster prior to the start of her political career.

Early life

Zianya Xcaret was born in the Cihuacoatl tlayacatl of the city of Angatahuaca on the 24th of July of 1979. Her mother was Ixazalouh Xcaret was a second generation Mutulese immigrant and had worked as a cardiologist before and during her relationship with Zianya's father, although she would leave behind her position at a local hospital shortly after the birth of her daughter and only child. Zianya's father was Zacahuehue Cuacuahuic whose family were long time natives of the Angatahuaca area since before the Revolution. He worked as an aircraft technician to support himself and his wife prior to their divorce. As is customary in modern Zacapican, Zianya was given her father's surname at birth but would later revert to her mother's Mutulese surname following the divorce of the couple and assignment of custody to Ixazalouh. Zianya attended Nemachtilcalli 541 and Nemachtiloyan 14 in her native Cihuacoatl neighborhood.

From an early age, Zianya was noted as being an especially studious girl. She boasted a nearly flawless academic record through both primary and secondary school, and expressed a great interest in the physical sciences beginning in her first year of secondary schooling when she was first exposed to laboratory sciences. Zianya had begun to express an interest in the nuclear sciences, which was considered a prestigious and high status career in Zacapican. However, this was met with pushback from her mother who viewed the profession much more negatively as a result of the Zacatlilco disaster, which occurred some four months before Zianya's tenth birthday. While Zianya would hold on to her interest in physics and nuclear science for many years, she would eventually be convinced not to enroll in Angatahuaca University as she had intended, instead volunteering to join the Aztaco Republican Guard, the public militia forces of the Aztaco Republic.

Military career

In 1997, Zianya joined the Aztaco Republican Guard's officer school where she once again demonstrated excellent academic acumen although it was noted that her adjustment to military culture was difficult at first. After this period of adaptation, however, Zianya came into her own within the hierarchy of the Aztaco Republican Guards. As an officer within that organization, she served as part of a small number of full time personnel responsible for managing a the skeleton crew within the Republican Guard chain of command overseeing the few thousands of Guardsmen called up to active service every year to undergo refresher training and serve the Aztaco Republic as law enforcement and emergency personnel. Zianya was active within the search and rescue units, serving with distinction in coordination with coastal protection units of the Zacapine regular Army and the Zacapine Navy. Her service in this capacity earned her a promotion to Captain at the unusually young age of 24, making her the youngest captain in the history of the Aztaco Republican Guards. Zianya's superiors commented on her stellar performance as an officer, stating at the time that they predicted Captain Xcaret would have a long and illustrious career in the Zacapine armed forces.

This career path would be disrupted by the events of August 4th, 2004, which saw Zacapican experience its second major nuclear accident in two decades. The Xochitlalpan disaster resulted in widespread radioactive contamination in the northern Aztaco Republic, with thousands of Aztaco Guardsmen being mobilized to contain and clean up the consequences of the disaster. Zianya assumed a great deal of control over the operations of the Guardsmen involved in the cleanup operations, chosen by officials of the CETZ to spearhead operations in the field because of her familiarity with nuclear science and the dangers of radioactivity. As a result, Zianya was stationed in the field heading long term cleanup operations within contaminated areas with high levels of radioactivity. Zianya took significant precautions to avoid exposure for her and her men as much as possible, but low level exposure would prove difficult to avoid altogether working in the contaminated areas of the Xochitlalpan zone of alienation. While her men were rotated in and out of the zone of alienation as they worked in a variety of roles with a higher risk of exposure, Zianya remained within the zone of 16 months continuously. Although she faced a lower dosage than many of her subordinates, the long term exposure nevertheless resulted in serious health effects stemming from chronic radiation syndrome. Zianya remained at her post even as symptoms began to manifest, but would eventually be recalled from the zone of alienation in December of 2005 and would subsequently be subject to an honorable discharge from the military for medical reasons.

Health issues

Prolonged low level exposure to radiation while working as part of the Xochitlalpan cleanup operations would have serious long term health consequences for Zianya Xcaret. She would receive two radiation burns during her service in the zone of alienation, which would later develop into radiation-induced fibrosis and result in permanent scar-like patches on her skin. The other major symptoms connected to her manifestation of chronic radiation syndrome would be a loss of taste and sense of smell and progressive atrophy of her muscles which came with tiredness and nausea, which began to manifest for several months before she was eventually recalled from the zone of alienation. Once recalled, an additional effect of the radiation exposure would be detected as Zianya developed aplastic anemia due to high levels of radiation damage to her bone marrow preventing her body from making blood cells in the necessary amounts. This would leave Zianya in a delicate medical condition for two years, resulting in her medical discharge from the Republic Guard and landing her in the hospital for prolonged periods. During this time many of her other radiation syndrome symptoms would slowly subside. She would eventually receive treatment for her aplastic anemia through a bone marrow transplant with her estranged father as the donor, going into recovery in 2007. The danger of relapse as well as the long term effects of her other complications from her radiation exposure has kept Zianya under the close watch of her doctors, although her life threatening aplastic anemia is believed to have been cured with her successful transplant treatment.

Marriage

Zianya married a Zacapine Air Force serviceman named Metzal Zancopinca on January 4th, 2002. The two had met while Zianya was engaged in a training regimen for helicopter rescue operations which involved air force personnel as instructors, one of whom had been Zancopinca. In the first two years of their relationship, Metzal and Zianya would travel together on frequent excursions by car across the remote countryside of the Zacapine interior. The two shared an interest in Zacapine literature and philosophy. However, strife would also be apparent from the start of the relationship, as Zianya opposed Metzal's expectation that the couple would have children together. Zianya would privately lament this position in later years, after she had become physically unfit to have children.

The marriage would eventually fall apart following Zianya's long term deployment in the Xochitlalpan cleanup activities. The deployment separated the couple for long periods of time, which began to strain the relationship especially due to the highly hazardous nature of Zianya's work and the lack of contact between the two. In the end, it would be Zianya who would initiate divorce procedures in 2009 after many years of strain because of her deployment and subsequent illness.

Political career

In the years following the Xochitlalpan disaster and the subsequent cleanup and investigations in which Zianya took part, the debate over what could and should be done in response to the nation's second large scale nuclear catastrophe in 15 years was central to Zacapine politics. The debate was dominated by the Tlayacanque and Tiachcaume factions which framed the debate as one about the future of the nuclear industry in Zacapican. The Tlayacanques, being widely supported by the technocratic intelligentsia that made up the country's scientific establishments including the government's nuclear industry initiatives, adopted a stance of defending the nuclear industry and furthermore deflecting blame wherever possible from the higher echelons of the scientific establishment within the national government, placing blame for the disaster squarely on the shoulders of the Xochitlalpan plant operators. The Tiachcaume had adopted an anti-nuclear stance since the Zacatlilco disaster and simply hammered away on the devastation wrought by the atom, a message which resonated with much of the Zacapine public as the country was now recovering from its second large scale nuclear catastrophe in just 15 years.

Zianya injected herself into this debate when she began to accept radio and TV interviews on the subject of the disaster and the cleanup operation, a matter on which Zianya was uniquely qualified to opine. Although these interviews may have been intended as primarily informational in nature, an embittered Zianya leveraged her newfound platform to not only establish what was largely already known about the immediate causes of the disaster but also to level several accusations of gross incompetence, mismanagement and corruption not at the Xochitlalpan plant leadership but rather at the nuclear authorities which were charged with overseeing them. By the time Zianya had taken the stage, the public debate in the country had already swung in favor of the anti-nuclear Tiachcaume faction, which meant that her criticism of the Tlayacanque reaction to the disaster was relatively insignificant when it came to the electoral downfall of that faction in the late 2010s. However, it would resonate well with the populist Macehualque faction, which had been languishing politically since the 1990s and struggling to regain national electoral relevance. The Macehualques had not had a strong unified position on Xochitlalpan, with many members of the faction taking disparate and contradictory positions, and so the party had been largely absent from the debate in mid 2000s. Following Zianya's appearance on the political stage with her interviews, a number of local Macehualque lawmakers and representatives from the Angatahuaca area took up the narrative Zianya had established, combining it with the party's long standing opposition to the technocracy of the Zacapine government to establish a coherent line of political attack around which the faction could rally its supporters.