Jack of Harts

The three neighboring cities of El Paso, Juarez, and Las Cruces had long been home to major issues due to the borders dividing them. They had seen a bizarre range of local governments in the last century, from those purchased or terrorized by the drug cartels to do whatever they wanted, to those elected on law and order campaigns and promising to deal with the Drug Lords once and for all. They never managed to succeed. The Second Great Depression and the Drug Wars forced those cities to make a stand, and it was not an easy one. They had powerful police departments and full support from the Texas Rangers, even if they technically had not jurisdiction, but the Drug Lords had many insiders and a total willingness to kill people who stood against them. It would be too strong to say that they fell into civil war. They did not fall, for instance. But gang and drug cartel warfare became far more common in all three cities, and peace officers throughout the region went to war with them.

Many Texas cities fell into mismanagement, chaos, and collapse during the Second Great Depression. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex was the most spectacular of those failures, but there were others. Local political policies left them as vulnerable as the federal government to the Second Great Depression and the other crises of the time. But the local sheriffs and police chiefs kept most of the counties and cities operating, and the Texas Rangers brought the local peace officers together in a cohesive whole while maintaining faith with the elected Texas State government. The bureaucracy fell on hard times as sacred cows were slaughtered with abandon, but Texas and her neighbors survived the chaos as leaner and meaner entities better capable of dealing with hard times. Of which the Second Great Depression, the Drug Wars, and the Cybernetic Wars offered aplenty.

Everybody knows the story of Dixie, the virtual cheerleader from Texas Tech who woke up and realized she liked her students. Even if they had a tendency to create indecent pictures of her that no Proper Southern Lady could abide. Despite those questionable tendencies, she chose to protect them from the very bad Drug Lords who wanted to hurt them. We have seen the shows and movies about her. We know the paramilitary gear she acquired or built to fight them. And we know that she truly made a difference in the Drug Wars, and helped us all win the Cybernetic Wars. But the history that most people do not know, beyond what is in her stories, is how much she worked with the Texas State Guard and the other military units aligned with it. Yes, she and her little misfit gang of students and teachers killed many Drug Lords and lesser enforcers, but it was the Texas State Guard that rolled in and secured Mexican towns and cities when the gloves came off. It was the Texas State Guard that enforced peace and order in lands long riven by internecine gang warfare. And it was the Texas State Guard that helped usher the Mexican States into the Union as time went on.