Chapter 7:
Standoff
“Come on sheriff! Come on highway patrol! Come on you pathetic fat ass campus cops! Come get us!”
The militia leader probably had the most bluster of any of them. The car driver had the least. He carried a perpetual hangdog look. The other three vacillated between anger, frustration, and fear, sometimes mocking the cops just to keep up their spirits.
The police backed off, of course. Just as in previous standoffs with militia, police showed a restraint that would never have been given to someone holding hostages in a failed convenience store robbery.
But it didn’t take much to rattle militia members. They do not trust government, so of course they would not trust any offers of food sent by cops. They also did not trust the cops to not poison the water fountains in the library. One militia man thought they might put hallucinogens in it to get them to shoot each other. Others expected it would have sleeping pills. So none of them dared fall asleep.
They did not even trust each other enough to sleep in shifts. As time went by they each began to entertain thoughts of who could be an informer, even who could not be dedicated enough to their ideals and would turn on them once they were arrested.
It didn’t take long. No surprise, Victor Dewayne White had given up after only twenty hours, and he was only slightly less prepared than this group. Rick McLaren, the leader of the ROT militia with six other allegedly trained members, had only been in able to carry out his standoff for a week.
This militia bunch fell apart in three days. Tired, sleep deprived, thirsty, hungry, and downright delusional, they staggered out into the light of day, prisoners of Carlos Guerrero himself!
Guerrero had not gotten much sleep, only a few sporadic hours a night. He seriously worried they would execute him, either in frustration, carelessness, or in revenge for starting a movement which threatened to take away nearly half the territory and people of their imagined (de facto All White or White Run) Texas Republic. He was certain they cursed him for exposing to the world the lie of the mythology surrounding the fanciful cowboy image of Texas. But he comforted himself knowing that if they killed him, most likely he would be far more of a potent symbol as a martyr. And others would take over, regardless of if he lived or not.
But to his surprise, he woke up in the early morning of the third day to see several of the militia had finally collapsed. Two of them had finally fallen half asleep, slumped over on the floor, but with their guns nearby. Another stood on the far side of the room, looking out the window warily. The militia leader stood stock still, intense and concentrating on something only he could see. The final member, the driver, shivered in the corner, but not from cold. He had utterly broken down, a wreck of a man.
Guerrero strained painfully against his bonds. The rope cut, but he was able to pull free. And no one had noticed, at least not yet.
The closest man to him had his gun half covered by his hand, but was not gripping it. Guerrero lunged forward.
The gun was in his hand! And no one had yet noticed. But there was no way to break through the barricades of tables pressed up against the doors without a lot of noise. And the librarian was still a hostage. No telling what they might do to her if he escaped. No way to wake her and remove her restraints without a chance of her making noise or attracting attention.
So Guerrero took careful aim at the man at the window. The bullet pierced the man’s shoulder. He slumped and fell to the ground. Then the militia leader was startled out of his reverie. Guerrero quickly shot him in the belly. The leader slumped forward, writhing in the most intense pain of his life.
The car driver stayed in a state of shock, still unaware of anything around him. The other two came awake. The one still with his weapon began to reach for it, but quickly stopped when he realized Carlos was pointing the seized gun straight at him.
And with that, the standoff was over.
Carlos emerged in the early morning light, with two of the disarmed militia men ahead of him and the librarian behind him.
“Officers, we’re coming out! The militia is disarmed!”
Police rushed forward. He laid his weapon down. The librarian laid down a bag with all the arms she had helped Guerrero gather from the other militia members.
Guerrero said, “There are two wounded men in there. And the last one seems to be in shock, maybe a mental breakdown.”
Police rushed into the library cautiously. All three injured men were taken to University Hospital, what was once called Bexar County General Hospital. These antigovernment rightwing militia men would be treated in a public hospital at public expense. Had their own purely privatized system been in place, they would have died from lack of treatment for their lack of ability to play. Two of the militia were blue collar workers, one a plumber’s helper and the other a laborer at construction sites. One was unemployed, and the other two ran small businesses, one selling weapons at guns shows and the other selling aluminum siding. All of them were barely getting by.
Both wounded men would recover, though the militia leader took several months to recuperate from the bullet tearing through his intestines. The second man never would regain full use of his shoulder again, looking like a hunchback for the rest of his life. A public defender for the mentally traumatized militia man argued for temporary insanity at trial, a defense tactic roundly condemned by right wingers as too soft on crime.
Guerrero was widely hailed as a hero, “the man who outfought five militia crazies.” Actually Guerrero did give credit to police for keeping up the pressure enough to effectively disarm the militia. Some of the public compared him to daring folk heroes like Joaquin Murietta, Juan Cortina or Gregorio Cortes, or Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson in Deathwish. One underground artist did a comic of Guerrero’s life showing him as a modern day Zorro, making utter fools of the militia in the same comical but daring way Zorro did to colonial soldiers.
Guerrero gave his first public appearance the day after the standoff, speaking spontaneously:
“Aztlan, we will become a state! Our fate is sealed! It is destiny! We know that and you know that!
The whole world has seen the true nature of these white supremacist militia wimps! Yes, they are wimps, cobardes, loudmouths, violent traitors, vermin and criminals, murderers and terrorists, small brained men with guns they can’t use because their verga is small and limp. I spit in their face! I kicked their tail all up and down the street! And so will we all, come convention day! And so will we all, come Election Day!
Use this chance to move forward, push hard. Push your congressmen! Push your senators!
Aztlan now! All the other states that wish to break away, act now!”
Video of the statement went viral. It was one of the most played clips online. This triumphant heroic end to the kidnapping was the final push the Aztlan Now movement needed. Aztlan Now delegates were elected from each county and sent to the statehood convention in the Alamodome. It was a foregone conclusion how they would vote.
It was also almost preordained now how all of Texas would vote in the referendum. The nonbinding independence resolution never had more than 30-35% support at any point. The real danger was always that in a low turnout, the ones most likely to vote were the ones most likely to favor it, older white conservative Republicans. Those most opposed to generally have a lower turnout, Blacks, Latinos, and younger voters.
But with the anger aroused by the kidnapping and the militia rally, and the jubilation following the triumphant end of the kidnapping, voter turnout reached an unprecedented 80%. (Something similar happened one state over when former KKK leader David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. When faced with the threat of a racist takeover, voter turnout soared and Duke lost by almost two to one.) Texans overwhelmingly voted against the secession resolution by over three to one, 77% opposed, 23% favoring.
The urban legend of Texas “independence,” which had never happened in the first place, was now dead. The possibility of it
ever coming true was gone beyond all doubt. Most striking of all was that of those opposed to secession, young white voters were almost as likely to oppose it as Latinos or Blacks. Those favoring secession would be as rare a species as believers in a flat earth a generation from now.
Aztlan Now prepared to make the new state of Aztlan. But while they would succeed beyond their wildest dreams, not all would turn out as some of them hoped.