
Rico Rodriguez (born 25 January 1968) is a Mexican-born Medician-American mercenary who currently serves as the ruler of the island-nation of Solis; previously, he was a CIA SAD agent who successfully destabilized and collapsed the regimes of San Esperito in 2005 and Panau in 2009.
He left the CIA sometime after, becoming a mercenary and returning to Medici in 2015 with the aid of his mentor, Tom Sheldon. Ultimately, Rodriguez freed Medici from Sebastiano Di Ravello's regime. After discovering the CIA and the mercenary group Black Hand were behind his parents' deaths, Rodriguez left for Solis and destroyed the Black Hand and fought off a subfaction of the CIA that hoped to claim the technologies of the Black Hand.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Rico Rodriguez was born in Mexico to a Mexican father and a Medician mother. Rodriguez was raised on Medici in the Mediterranean, and his parents were murdered during Sebastiano Di Ravello's seizure of power in 1986. He first met CIA agent Tom Sheldon during his escape from Medici, and he was recruited by the CIA during the invasion of Panama in 1989. He became renowned for his expertise in high-risk deployments of the type that were commonly referred to as "regime change" missions, and he developed a strong partnership and brief romantic relationship with fellow agent Maria Kane. He took part in a mission to Guatemala before playing a central role in the San Esperitan Civil War of 2005, helping socialist rebels and a cartel overthrow the dictator Salvador Mendoza.

Rodriguez in 2010
In 2010, after Sheldon went missing in Panau with millions of dollars of CIA cash, the Agency suspected him of going rogue and ordered that he be found and killed. Kane recruited Rodriguez to find his old mentor and, if he turned out to be a traitor, neutralize him. Rodriguez established contact with CIA asset Karl Blaine, who put him in touch with the island's three main criminal groups: the communist Roaches, the ultranationalist Ular Boys, and the capitalist Roaches. Through working with those groups, he gathered intelligence that led him to a reunion with Sheldon, who turned out to be engaged in a deep-cover operation to investigate dictator Pandak Panay's sudden turn away from the USA. After a captured Blaine sold out CIA agent Jade Tan to the Panauan Army, Rodriguez helped rescue her and learned that Russia, China, and Japan were backing the island's factions. Rodriguez and Sheldon located the three nations' advisors at the Three Kings Hotel and assassinated them, but Sheldon ordered Rodriguez to investigate what was drawing the foreign powers to Panau. Rodriguez and Sheldon eventually tracked Panay down to the Wajah Ramah Fortress, where Rodriguez and the Reapers assaulted the Panauan military's defenses. Panay seemed to have been killed when an escaped Karl Blaine pulled a grenade pin and vowed to avenge Tan's supposed death, and Rodriguez escaped the base as it self-destructed. However, Japan, Russia, and China each exploited the power vacuum by dispatching supertankers to Panau to seize its oil and fight against the rival nations. Rodriguez was dispatched to the Selatan Oil and Gas Fields to prevent the invading fleets from seizing the oil, but, along the way, he discovered a nuclear submarine, the U1, rising from the water. Rodriguez stormed the vessel and found Panay to still be alive and planning to fire nuclear missiles at the superpowers who invaded Panau, as well as at the USA. Panay's jacket snagged onto a missile, and Rodriguez grappled onto another one, disabling three of them before hopping onto Panay's missile, reprogramming it to strike the oil fields, and parachuting to safety. The missile killed Panay and destroyed Panau's vast oil reserves, thus forcing the tankers to return to their home countries. Washington DC was infuriated with Rodriguez's destruction of the largest oil reserves, but he reasoned to his colleagues that he had saved the world from World War III, and that Panau's oil was not worth dying over. Having posed as the mercenary "Scorpion" to gain the trust of Panau's factions, Rodriguez remained in Panau to perform mercenary work and hunt down Panay's colnoels, who continued to resist the increasing power of the island's factions.
In 2015, an uprising broke out against General Di Ravello on Medici. After the CIA refused to support the overthrow of their former asset, Rodriguez retired from the Agency and traveled to Medici himself. Sheldon aided Rodriguez in establishing contact with his old friend Mario Frigo and the Liberar Salrosa rebel group, and Rodriguez helped the rebels liberate the island, even in the face of brutal government crackdowns and Di Ravello's weaponization of the mineral Bavarium. As the rebellion progressed, the United States refused to aid Di Ravello's regime, and Rodriguez destroyed Di Ravello's Bavarium-powered helicopter as he attempted to flee from his volcanic island base. Rodriguez executed Di Ravello after the dictator monologued about failing Medici, freeing the island and enabling Rosa Manuela to establish a democratic government.