age of 18 when he joined the 24 de Septiembre Microbus and Taxi Syndicate. He got his start as head of one of Plan 3,000's taxi routes, later serving for two terms as secretary of transportation of routes 47, 62, and 94 between 2001 and 2002 before being elected president of said routes four consecutive times between 2005 and 2008. During this time, he also served as his organization's secretary of conflicts from 2003 to 2005. Fernández capped off his rise through the ranks of the sector's trade unions in 2006 when he was elected president of the Plan 3,000 Urban Drivers' Bloc, representing twenty-two of the area's workers' organizations and affiliated route owners. Chamber of Deputies Election Since the district's formation, Plan 3,000's predominantly disadvantaged population made it a center of proletarian opposition to Santa Cruz's economic elite. Throughout the early 2000s, this fact was harnessed by the nascent Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP) into popular support for the party, converting the district into one of its primary partisan bases in the department. Fernández, for his part, first joined the MAS in 2001, around the same time that he had begun forming a political wing to represent the drivers' unions. The confluence of these two groups—the MAS and the drivers' unions—generated a lasting political alliance, one whose vote-getting power was first put to the test at the municipal level in 2004 and at the regional in 2005. On the first occasion, Fernández contested a seat on the Santa Cruz Municipal Council but was unsuccessful. A subsequent nomination for a party-list seat in the Chamber of Deputies in the following year's general election also ended in failure. In both cases, the MAS's incipient presence in Santa Cruz prevented it from attaining significant legislative representation. Despite these initial losses, Fernández and the drivers' union's alliance with the MAS only solidified from 2005 on and continued through ensuing election cycles. In 2009, the country's national drivers' federation elected to lend its full support to the party, a pact that garnered the sector a quota of candidacies for its representatives in all nine departments. In Santa Cruz, Fernández was again put forward for a seat in the lower chamber, representing the 16 de Noviembre Federation of Unionized Drivers, a syndicate composed of fifty-six affiliated drivers' unions. Unlike in previous years, Fernández exited victorious, owing to the MAS's steadily improving performance in the Santa Cruz