When I first interviewed Enrique Tarrio in 2018, I didn’t make much of his fascination with strongmen like Augusto Pinochet. I thought his references to the Chilean dictator were just part of Enrique’s normal provocative banter, and I dismissed their significance. Looking back, I see how Enrique was strategically leveraging his political trauma with communism to romanticize Pinochet as a type of dictator that was not just needed in Chile, but in the U.S. as well. Years later, this would come back to haunt Enrique.
When I met him in his Miami home in April 2019, he gave our Vice media crew a quick tour around his home. That was the house where Enrique was born and the neighborhood that gave his family of Cuban exiles new opportunities. His home felt warm at first. It was full of Cuban artifacts, and it had that familiar aroma of Cuban coffee and old cigars. But as Enrique kept walking through the house, the space began to feel cold and alienating to me. Enrique’s living room felt like a MAGA gift shop. He had MAGA hats, mugs, and posters everywhere. As he explained, those were the items he sold on his online store, which gave him the means to fund his activism with the Proud Boys. He took me inside a big walk-in closet where more merchandise was stored and pulled out a black T-shirt that read “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong.” Enrique held the shirt in his hands with a huge smile. This would be the first of many times I would see that shirt. I asked about it and pointed out that Pinochet had been accused of being a murderer. “Che is worse than Pinochet!” Enrique said immediately, justifying Pinochet’s violent actions in the name of anticommunism.
As described in chapter 7, Pinochet’s bloody coup, which ousted the democratically elected socialist President Allende in 1973, ushered in almost two decades of authoritarian rule marked by fear, repression, and persecution. His reign of terror targeted Indigenous people, dissidents, labor unions, and, mostly, leftists. During Pinochet’s dictatorship, more than forty thousand people were tortured and over three thousand were killed or disappeared. Yet he was respected among American officials. During Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1976 state visit to Chile, Kissinger reinforced the United States’ support. “It is my evaluation that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going communist,” Kissinger said. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.” By 1986, Pinochet’s atrocities were widely known and recorded, yet President Reagan described the dictator as having “saved his country” in national security meetings. Decades later, Enrique Tarrio and many of his fellow Proud Boys had a perception of Pinochet that aligned with that of Kissinger and his contemporaries in the U.S. government: The Chilean dictator was an anticommunist hero.
Shortly after visiting Enrique’s house, I started noticing those Pinochet shirts and other more problematic references to the right-wing dictator in far-right rallies across the country. In 2020, Enrique was seen at several protests wearing military body armor along with a cryptic patch that read “RWDS,” which is short for “Right Wing Death Squad.” At that point, it became increasingly common to see Proud Boys wearing “RWDS” patches, which were often described as “neo-Nazi symbols” by the media. But they were more than that. The specific reference to being part of a “death squad” was part of Enrique’s and the Proud Boys’ unique fascination with Pinochet and other far-right Latin American strongmen. During his dictatorship, Pinochet ordered “death flights” to rid the nation of leftists and communists. The regime’s actions included tossing hundreds of bodies out of helicopters into Chile’s oceans, lakes, and rivers. Other South and Central American governments and paramilitary units carried out similar actions in the 1970s and ’80s to forcibly “disappear” political opponents; thus the term “RWDS” was used to label those who carried out these assassinations. “RWDS” mentions reemerged among extremist groups in the U.S. in the mid-2010s and took hold once the Proud Boys took off after Trump’s 2016 win. As Dr. Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said to me about the Proud Boys: “They really turned Pinochet almost into a fetish.”
Wearing those “RWDS” patches and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” T-shirts was an intentional, deeply considered move on the part of Tarrio and others like him. Many Latinos, like Tarrio, were personally and emotionally connected with a past where violence and brutality were morally justified, especially if it was guided by strongmen. For people like Enrique, “communism,” “socialism,” and “the left” will always be synonymous with instability and disruption. When we spoke in 2018, I wondered how far Enrique would be willing to go to fight that illusionary enemy. On January 6, 2021, I had my answer.
Could anyone ever have predicted that the son of immigrants, an Afro-Latino who as a boy once played on the streets of Little Havana and dreamed of becoming a spy in support of the U.S. government, would be one of the masterminds behind the January 6 insurrection? Perhaps it was always obvious that, given the opportunity to shine, Enrique Tarrio would prove that he was a natural leader who could usher the United States into one of the most dangerous chapters in its history. He joined the Proud Boys in 2016 and rose quickly through the ranks, finding belonging not just in the collective effort to fight “the radical left” but also in the sense of power he gained through the extremist group. This newfound confidence enabled him to demonstrate that an ordinary Latino man from Miami could also carry the torch of white supremacy. Tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma all culminated in Tarrio, making him an exemplary insurrectionist.
I texted Enrique on November 4, 2020, the day after news stations were already predicting that Donald Trump had lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. As a fervent MAGA supporter and an organizer for Latinos for Trump, I assumed he would be extremely disappointed, even enraged. Every time I had talked to him prior to the election, he was confident Trump would win. Keeping Trump in power had become Enrique’s ultimate goal. But to my surprise, he seemed a lot calmer than I had imagined, almost as if he knew that things would eventually turn out his way. When I asked how he was feeling, he responded, “Sore, but not bad.”
Less than two months after that text exchange, Enrique was floating the possibility of using violence to ensure that Trump stay in office. In the weeks leading up to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory by Congress on January 6, Trump continued to push false claims of a stolen election and implored his base to protest the results. Meanwhile, Enrique was organizing a small secret leadership group with other Proud Boys members that intended to stop Congress from moving forward with the certification of the Electoral College vote. Nothing was off the table for him and his group of “real men,” all of whom believed Trump’s Big Lie. For weeks, the leadership council, which Enrique dubbed the “Ministry of Self-Defense,” hinted at various schemes to achieve their goal on January 6, like rioting in Washington, attacking the police, and storming the Capitol. As the date approached, Enrique seemed even more emboldened by both his power and his imagination. Through their “Ministry” group chat, text messages, Telegram chats, Parler chats, and other social media communications, the “Ministry” asked their followers to join the “revolution,” and Enrique passed along concrete guidance, urging them to pack basic military gear and remember to remain incognito the day of. Beyond the physical threats Enrique foresaw—such as fighting with other groups or law enforcement—his mind was haunted by the thought that a U.S. Capitol headed by Joe Biden as president was equivalent to the Bolsheviks’ 1917 takeover of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, something Enrique alluded to through text exchanges with an ex-girlfriend. His mission was to defend his own version of the Winter Palace, no matter what.
But perhaps more important than his fears was the image Enrique had of himself: He felt invincible. On New Year’s Day, he told his Parler followers: “Let’s bring this new year with one word in mind…Revolt.” Enrique arrived in the capital from Miami on January 4, 2021, two days ahead of the pro-Trump rallies that were scheduled to protest the election results. He was ready to revolt. But as he headed downtown in a silver Honda Crosstour, Enrique was stopped and arrested by D.C. police on a warrant charging him with allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic Black church during a pro-Trump rally the month prior. During the arrest, the police found two high-capacity ammunition magazines decorated with Proud Boys logos. Unsurprisingly, the judge ordered Enrique to leave D.C. immediately and stay away (with the exception of appearing in court), which meant Enrique couldn’t partake in any January 6 event as he had originally intended. This didn’t matter, because his presence would still be felt. As Enrique was being arrested, he texted one of his co-conspirators: “Whatever happens…make it a spectacle.”
The morning of January 6, D.C.’s sky was covered with big gray clouds. It was supposed to be an ordinary day during which the peaceful and effective transfer of presidential power would reaffirm that the country’s centuries-old institutions were working. For millions of Latinos and immigrants across the country who had left behind Latin America’s tumultuous autocratic regimes, this day was never to be taken for granted. It was a reminder that we lived in a functioning democracy. But the morning stillness was interrupted by the rumbles of angry masses as they made their way to hear President Trump at the “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. By noon, thousands of Trump supporters were gathered to hear remarks from their commander in chief, who, for over an hour, exhorted his base to challenge Biden’s electoral certification, eventually asking them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Congress. “Fight like hell,” Trump told his crowd. If they didn’t, he warned, they would lose their country.
By the time Trump finished his remarks at 1:10 p.m., a sea of people, the vast majority of whom were white, flooded the streets. Some were already beginning to storm the outer police barrier surrounding the Capitol. The huge American flags many were holding were their way of reclaiming power and order in a country that was rapidly changing in front of their eyes. No matter where they looked, a multicultural America that defied hierarchies, traditions, and norms was gaining strength, threatening their status and the heart of their identity as white people. The nation was on its way to becoming a pluralistic, majority-minority country, and four more years of a Trump presidency was the only way to stop that. A man in the crowd was wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt, a Nazi reference, while others waved Confederate flags and gestured the “OK” hand symbol, a nod to white power. This led many to believe that the angry mob of white people rapidly approaching the Capitol was made up entirely of extremists, far-right groups, and militia members—society’s outcasts. In reality, most were ordinary Americans from all walks of life who had become radicalized by their own grievances.
Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, did one of the most extensive analyses of the demographic makeup of the January 6 insurrectionists. He found, contrary to popular belief, that the majority of the insurrectionists weren’t unemployed, poor, or residents of conservative, rural states. Rather, many of them were middle-class white professionals hailing from blue states and counties with declining white populations. What united these people? Pape’s national survey found that the top motivating factor among the insurrectionists was the Great Replacement theory: the delusion that they were losing power in the face of a growing minority population. By January 2021, Latinos had become the largest minority group, Black and brown people were fundamentally changing the nation’s politics, and immigrants were continuing to integrate into the very same neighborhoods the insurrectionists inhabited. Generations of Anglo Americans felt endangered by that prospect.
But lost amid that white sea that crashed over the Capitol on January 6 were countless people with last names like Marquez, Montano, Alvear, Vargas, Rivera, Hernandez, Camargo—Latino insurrectionists who shared their white counterparts’ grievances. These Latino participants embodied both the downfall of old American white supremacy and the birth of its new, multicultural façade. They marched with the same fears and purpose as other insurrectionists, but with a need to blend in and prove their loyalty to a country that had never fully accepted them.
Among them was Jesus Rivera, who went by “Chicano Patriot” and lived in Pensacola, Florida. There was Nicolas Alvear, a young Venezuelan living in California. There was Hector Vargas, a proud Puerto Rican from New Jersey. Edward Francisco Rodriguez from Brooklyn. Wilmar Montano from Houston and of Salvadoran descent. Anthony Aguero, the border vigilante from El Paso. Federico Klein, a D.C. resident of Argentine descent. Samuel Camargo from South Florida and of Brazilian descent. And there was Gabriel Garcia, from my hometown of Miami, the son of Cuban immigrants and a member of the Proud Boys. Gabriel had originally gotten on a plane from Miami to support Enrique’s release from D.C. jail but, in a matter of hours, quickly became an insurrectionist himself.
After Gabriel got a Fox News notification alerting him to the commotion taking place at the Capitol, he immediately made his way to join the masses. Wearing his red MAGA hat, he picked up his phone and started recording a Facebook livestream as he walked with a large group of people down Constitution Avenue toward the Capitol. By the time Gabriel got to the building’s perimeter, a wave of protesters had already overcome the police and barricades that were protecting the building. Instead of stopping and staying on the sidelines, as many others did, Gabriel decided to keep marching ahead. By approximately 2:19 p.m., he was inside the Capitol, witnessing an aggressive confrontation between the rioters and Capitol police officers. At that point, Gabriel turned his phone camera on himself again and said: “We just went ahead and stormed the Capitol. It’s about to get ugly!” From the online footage, it seemed like Gabriel’s intuition was to keep pushing forward. He advanced through the crowd and shuffled people around as he headed toward the front of the standoff, where the police officers were firmly creating a human barricade. Once Gabriel reached the front line, he joined the chorus of chants around him, “USA! USA! USA! USA!”
Meanwhile, after being released from custody and banned from D.C., Enrique Tarrio was back in his hotel room in Baltimore watching the insurrection unfold on his TV screen. Anchors and reporters across the country were trying to make sense of the developing news, struggling to find the right words to describe the surreal images and grasp the urgency of the moment. But Enrique knew exactly what to say. He turned to his phone and posted on his group chat: “for now I’m enjoying the show…Do what must be done. #WeThePeople.” A couple of minutes later, Enrique implored his followers not to leave the Capitol. After a series of posts, Enrique proudly affirmed: “Yep…Make no mistake…We did this.”
Enrique would have been proud of Gabriel. Now, standing inches away from the police, with an entire crowd behind him, Gabriel faced the officers and started to provoke them. He aggressively yelled, “USA! Storm this shit!” as the officers held up their arms and stopped him from advancing. Amid all the chants and angry yells, Gabriel and others uttered two words that perfectly captured the message he wanted to send that day: “Our house!” With their words, the crowd marked its territory. The Capitol and the country whose power it represented was their house and, by extension, Gabriel’s house, too. A couple of minutes later, Gabriel asserted his allegiance again, this time by yelling at a police officer: “How does it feel being a traitor to the country? How does it feel?” Then Gabriel kept pushing forward, eventually rushing through the officers and into the Capitol Rotunda.
Gabriel suddenly found himself standing under the 288-foot dome situated above the Rotunda, surrounded by centuries-old art that told the story of the United States’ creation. The space was imposing. Charles Bulfinch, the architect who directed the construction of the building in the 1820s, had intended the Rotunda to feel like an ancient Roman temple. Gabriel was surrounded by walls that had witnessed history: nurses tending to wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War; the country’s first Black president strolling the Capitol’s hallways; and services honoring historical American figures like Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and Harry Reid. The walls told stories. They were covered with historic frescoes and paintings that captured the evolution of America’s democracy. From the landing of the Pilgrims to the 1776 Declaration of Independence to George Washington’s resignation as commander in chief of the Continental Army, these images recounted America’s origin story.
But there was no way of telling America’s story without looking further back and toward the Caribbean and Latin America. Hovering over the insurrectionists was the image of Christopher Columbus’s first landing in the New World on October 12, 1492. Columbus is holding a sword in one hand while waving the Kingdom of Spain’s flag in the other as he declares the discovery of the Americas. The painting was a homage to the European explorer, but it also alluded to the notion that the story of America’s democracy had always been preceded by Spanish colonialism, a violent force that would forever remain a shadow over the United States’ history.
In one of Gabriel’s last livestreams, at around 2:24 p.m., he showed his followers the view of the Rotunda’s dome as he aggressively called for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was set to preside over the vote certification in Congress. “Nancy, come out and play!” he yelled. “Nancy! Nancy!” Before he ended the video, Gabriel turned the camera on himself one last time and called out, “Free Enrique!,” referring to Tarrio’s previous incident with the D.C. police. Enrique wasn’t physically there, but he was on Gabriel’s mind. At 2:38 p.m., Donald Trump, who earlier that morning had incited his base to revolt, took to Twitter to implore the rioters to remain peaceful. It was too late. The rioters’ darkest, truest selves had already been unleashed in full force. At the end, more than five people died in connection to the riot. Eventually, the FBI used Gabriel’s Facebook footage to locate, identify, and arrest him on several charges, including civil disorder and obstructing the certification of votes. After Gabriel showed the entire world his journey through the Capitol, he still pleaded not guilty and was eventually granted pretrial release with strict travel restrictions.
How did Gabriel end up there in the first place? Gabriel Garcia is a first-generation American born in New Jersey to parents who were part of the Pedro Pan operation. From 1960 to 1962, the U.S. ran a covert program that airlifted more than fourteen thousand unaccompanied minors, including Gabriel’s father and mother, from Havana to the U.S. Many of these kids were eventually reunited with their parents, others were adopted, taken in by Catholic Charities, or sent to boarding schools. Gabriel’s parents ended up growing up in the U.S. before meeting each other and having Gabriel. When Gabriel was three years old, his family moved from New Jersey to Miami, where Gabriel was raised by his grandparents for a significant part of his childhood.
Unsurprisingly, they instilled in the boy a deep resentment toward Castro and a set of conservative values that would shape Gabriel’s future political beliefs. In 2002, he joined the U.S. Army and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a captain. After serving for fifteen years, Gabriel married a Mexican woman, had three children, and in 2017 opened a small construction business in Miami. In 2020, he ran for Congress, positioning himself in the Republican primary as the more conservative candidate, an anticommunist and, more than anything, an avid Trump supporter. He lost in the primary, but he still loved Trump and was involved in Enrique Tarrio’s Latinos for Trump outreach efforts throughout the 2020 presidential election. Yet what Gabriel failed to publicly mention during his congressional bid was that he was also a member of Tarrio’s Proud Boys, a club that had in 2018 been classified by the FBI as an extremist group with white nationalist ties.
I first saw Gabriel in Miami at the press conference organized to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, where he had assured that “there’s nothing racist about a guy called Gabriel Garcia.” What I didn’t know then was that, a couple of months later, Gabriel would agree to sit down with me for an interview on MSNBC. When my producer, Lara Fernandez, told me that he had agreed to talk, I couldn’t believe it. I wondered why he would do it. What could be in it for him? In May 2022, our crew headed to Gabriel’s lawyer’s office where the interview was scheduled to take place inside a white fancy building in Miami’s Coral Way neighborhood. By then, Gabriel was out on bail and awaiting trial. My intention was to understand what led Gabriel to the U.S. Capitol. Gabriel’s intention was to clarify his role. Some of Gabriel’s social media accounts had been shut down, and companies like Chase Bank and Uber had canceled Gabriel’s accounts. He felt like he was being silenced and wanted an opportunity to speak on his own behalf. But I felt like I knew his voice already, given how many times I had watched his footage from the insurrection. As we headed to meet him, I had Gabriel’s voice echoing in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about his Facebook Live posts, about the way he ran toward those Capitol police officers, the way he chanted “USA! USA! USA!” with the crowd, and the way his voice reverberated across the Rotunda. I couldn’t stop wondering what was going on in Gabriel’s head that day: What made him want to join that mob of white people? What was he thinking?
I was admittedly nervous before meeting him. There was no doubt he was an extremely aggressive and dangerous person. His own posts had revealed it. Gabriel was also known among his Proud Boys friends and other locals as El Capitán, a reference to his military service but also, in my eyes, a nod to the virility and masculinity these men wanted so badly to project and defend. Was I intimidated by El Capitán at first? Absolutely. But that feeling dissipated the moment I made eye contact. It was as if I were facing a different person from the one I had seen on my cell phone screen. Inside that Capitol, as a part of that chanting crowd, Gabriel had a sense of purpose, confidence, and belonging. The man I was now facing was timid, nervous, and extremely fidgety. He looked out of place. He seemed vulnerable. Gabriel barely even looked at me when I introduced myself. One of the first things I noticed was the court-ordered GPS ankle monitor. “Better than being in jail,” he told me, “so, not gonna complain.” He told me the ankle monitor wasn’t just embarrassing, but that it had also affected his construction business and the way people viewed him. Yet the way people perceived him, both at home and nationwide, varied immensely. While some considered Gabriel a domestic terrorist, others saw him as a true hero, especially around South Florida. “Some congratulate me,” Gabriel affirmed quietly. I officially started the interview.
“You’re a Proud Boy. You’re a Trump supporter. People have also known you as an obstructionist. Are all those labels you identify with?” I asked him.
“No. First of all, my name is Gabriel Garcia. My first language was Spanish. I’m definitely not a white supremacist,” he said.
Without me even mentioning the words “white supremacy,” Gabriel wanted to set the record straight: He was not a white supremacist. Yet no one could deny the fact that Gabriel was surrounded by white supremacist rioters on January 6. The day we spoke, Gabriel spent a fair amount of time deflecting and downplaying his role and intentions on that day. He told me he had good reason to believe the 2020 election was stolen and that he wanted to ensure the results weren’t fraudulent. “Did you have any doubts in 2016 when Trump won?” I asked. He didn’t. In his descriptions, Gabriel painted the picture of a man who had simply gotten caught up in the moment. He reiterated that he had no intention of storming the Capitol or walking into any offices. He was simply following his curiosity, which led him to join the masses and march side by side with them through the barricades and into the Rotunda. Throughout the interview, Gabriel was saying all the right things. After all, his lawyer was in the room listening intently to all of his answers. Gabriel pushed back against white supremacy, vehemently denounced violence, and affirmed his innocence. “I’m not going to label it ‘insurrection’ because I wasn’t there to take over the government or kill anyone or hurt anybody,” Gabriel said as his lawyer nodded his head in approval.
Yes, the man I was interviewing wasn’t the same person I saw on January 6. He was guarded. I understood that the cues I was searching for would never be found in Gabriel’s polished answers to my questions regarding his involvement that day. The answers lay elsewhere. In fact, the answers had already been hiding in plain sight for years, as Gabriel had long held the three traits that make for the perfect American insurrectionist: tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma.
If there was ever any doubt about who Gabriel’s tribe was, the slogan on his T-shirt was there to clarify it: “Illegal immigration Is Trespassing.” It seemed to me that, as the son of immigrants and as a Latino man, Gabriel’s fear of being otherized or perceived as an outsider fueled his pursuit of belonging within the angry white mob. He shared the sentiment of white grievance and experienced an additional layer of resentment at potentially being lumped into the same group as immigrants. The “them versus us” narrative started to seep into Gabriel’s answers. “They come here,” he said, referring to immigrants. “They get some kind of cold food…. They get to see medics if they need to. But if a taxpaying citizen trespasses and protests? You get thrown in jail.” He seemed resentful. And if there was ever any doubt about Gabriel’s intent to preserve traditionalism, his role with the Proud Boys was a manifestation of his colonized mind and his commitment to upholding patriarchal norms. “It’s okay to be male still today, masculinity is still alive,” Gabriel said casually. “I am more aligned with the 1960s and 1970s views, meaning it’s okay for a wife if they want to stay home.” As Gabriel talked, I remained haunted by the sound of his voice on January 6 as he aggressively invoked Nancy Pelosi’s name inside the Rotunda. She was a progressive, powerful woman who represented everything the insurrectionists despised. Finally, if there was ever any doubt about the deep-rooted trauma that guided Gabriel’s path to violence, the imaginary threat of communism was evidently omnipresent throughout his entire life.
“That fear of communism, did that affect your drive to the Capitol?” I asked.
“I’m not gonna lie. It kind of went through my head,” he said.
“How many Latinos that were present that day were driven by this fear of communism being instilled in the country?”
“Probably almost all of them that I spoke to,” he affirmed.
By Gabriel’s count, there were more than a hundred Latinos present on January 6, a figure that has been hard to confirm since no organization has done a deep analysis on all the Latinos who participated in the insurrection. What we do know from testimonies, public records, investigative journalism, and video footage is that the white mob wasn’t as white and monolithic as it seemed from our TV screens. If you zoomed in on the images, you could see “outsiders” like Gabriel Garcia roaming around the U.S. Capitol. Some Latinos like him or twenty-five-year-old Felipe Marquez from Coral Springs were there to protest communism. Others, like border vigilante Anthony Aguero, may have been there due to the “invasion of immigrants” they perceived at the southern border. There were Latinos like Andrew Alan Hernandez from California who stormed the Capitol because he feared a “tyrannical dictatorship” would ensue if the country failed to reinstate Trump. Other rioters like Argentine Federico “Freddie” Klein had an actual record of praising far-right military dictatorships in Latin America. Together, these Latino insurrectionists—each of them carrying the weight of their own tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma—defended a vision of America that advanced the white rioters’ cause. Looking back, perhaps it was more than that. These Latinos didn’t just advance that vision—one of them led it.
About two years after the insurrection, more than one thousand people were facing charges related to the riot. In May 2023, Enrique Tarrio was found guilty of multiple felonies for his involvement in January 6, including seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. Four months later, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, sentenced Enrique to twenty-two years in prison for the central role he played in orchestrating the insurrection. It was the longest sentence given to any January 6 defendant at that point. Enrique’s defense team was flabbergasted that someone who wasn’t even inside the Capitol or even physically present in D.C. on January 6 could receive such a lengthy sentence. What shocked me most wasn’t the severity of the sentence, but rather the words the judge and prosecutors used to describe Tarrio. In their sentencing recommendations, prosecutors painted the picture of a man who was a “naturally charismatic leader” and a “savvy propagandist,” words that have been historically used to define the core characteristics of authoritarian leaders. The prosecutors continued, adding: “He was a general rather than a soldier.” By the time Judge Kelly sentenced Enrique, he concluded that Tarrio was the “ultimate leader, the ultimate person who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal.” All of those words stuck with me.
Leaders and generals don’t have to go to war: They inspire their armies to join the battlefield. That’s their greatest power. On January 6, miles away from Enrique, Gabriel Garcia followed his general’s vision. Out of a vast sea of angry white Americans, Gabriel suddenly and unexpectedly emerged on the front lines. And, underneath that majestic dome, the walls of which told the story of America, Gabriel had emulated the steps of European colonizers, claiming his land, beliefs, and power in the same way Columbus had five hundred years ago when he first landed in the so-called New World and planted his flag. Had anyone else surrounding Gabriel looked up toward the dome, they would have realized that the Latinos around them—those who could claim being the descendants of the original colonizers—could carry the torch of white supremacy forward even in the age of modern American multiculturalism. Had they looked up toward the dome, they would have understood that their story’s arc—the survival of white supremacy—needed Latinos to endure.
I don’t necessarily blame Gabriel for lacking the right words or for struggling to make sense of his own actions on January 6, for he himself unknowingly answered a complex question the nation had been grappling with for years: Can a Latino be a white supremacist? I didn’t need Gabriel’s words to confirm that, because his actions spoke for themselves. All I needed to understand was Gabriel’s visceral reaction among the white mob when he reached the top of the mountain that day. What did he feel in those halls of power? What did he feel when no one was watching, when his eyes were closed, and when a new chapter of American history, a coup, seemed to be at arm’s length? “It was just an adrenaline rush with the crowd,” he said, wide-eyed, in response to what it felt like being inside the Capitol that day.
I feared he would never be able to forget that feeling. I feared he’d eventually search for that high again. But as I finished the interview, Gabriel assured me he regretted participating in the insurrection. “If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t even go there,” he said. His apparent sense of shame and the potential legal repercussions Gabriel was facing gave me reason to believe he could learn from his mistakes. That, in turn, would require some painful introspection and distancing from the main leader who had unleashed a violent, undemocratic force across the country: Donald Trump. Less than a year after I interviewed Gabriel, he signed up to be a Miami-Dade County volunteer poll worker during the 2022 midterms. Poll workers have always been essential parts of our democratic system. It’s a job that requires volunteers to maintain integrity, respect all voters, and remain completely nonpartisan. Yet a couple of days before Election Day, Gabriel took to his phone again. From his car, sporting a “Fuck Biden” hat and big glasses, he looked straight into the camera and said, “That’s right, you heard it right, I’m working the poll. Cry some more, liberals. Enjoy your day.”
A couple of months after Gabriel uploaded that video, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was overseeing Gabriel’s case, scolded him for defying her court orders and violating her pretrial release conditions. It turns out Gabriel had been flying across the country without her permission, which prompted Judge Jackson to order Gabriel on a stricter home detention. Despite what I’d perceived during our interview, Gabriel didn’t go on to show genuine repentance. In fact, he seemed dangerously spiteful and powered by rage. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly came to a similar observation during Enrique’s final sentencing. At the end of his long hearing, Judge Kelly concluded that Enrique had shown “no remorse” for his actions. It was then that I understood the gravity of the moment American democracy was facing.
January 6 fundamentally transformed the American electorate, igniting some of us to reaffirm our commitment to democratic values, while emboldening others to lean into an authoritarian penchant they didn’t know they had within them. As a country, we couldn’t unsee the brutal images that unfolded in front of our eyes on January 6, images reminiscent of a painful story far too many Latinos who have lived through coups are familiar with. Yet those images evoked a primal response among some Latino voters who—led by their fears, deeply entrenched beliefs, and generational traumas—unconsciously opted to continue pushing the rioters’ vision of America forward instead of protecting the integrity of our democracy. It wasn’t just far-right extremists like Gabriel or Enrique, but also Latinos across the political spectrum who, in big and small ways, showed their true colors in the months and years that followed the insurrection.
During that time, I traveled from the Spanish plazas of Santa Fe to the Bronx’s Dominican hair salons, from the evangelical churches along the southern border to California school boards, from South Florida to Nevada to Colorado. I met truck drivers, pastors, first-time voters, churchgoers, Democrats, MAGA-lovers, immigrants, queers, Afro-Latinos, Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadorans, who, collectively, echoed the chants heard inside the hallways of the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Collectively, they unmasked a new face of Latino voters who could no longer be defined by political binaries. They taught me that they were more willing to align themselves with an authoritarian leader rather than engage in the historical reckoning and civil engagement needed to liberate the United States from its dark past. In many ways, the United States’ own complicated record of interventions in Latin America had led us to this exact point in history, conditioning generations of Latinos to opt for strongmen and undemocratic belief systems. When America was faced with its own crisis of democracy, some Latinos simply did what they were taught to do for centuries: Defend their caudillos and generals, instead of the health of democracies.
And now what? Although the January 6 insurrection didn’t successfully lead to a coup, it confirmed what we all feared: We know it can happen. We know we’re not immune to authoritarianism. We no longer have to imagine this scenario. As reported by The New York Times, Donald Trump has already warned voters about his authoritarian plans if he returns to the White House in 2025. We know what Trump and his allies would do. Among other things, Trump would significantly expand his presidential powers, preside over independent agencies (like the Federal Communications Commission), and replace nonpartisan civil servants working in places like the State Department or the Department of Defense with MAGA loyalists. Trump has even publicly suggested he would terminate parts of the U.S. Constitution. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and scholar of authoritarianism, has repeatedly cautioned, Trump is, once again, merely following the authoritarian playbook. The problem is no longer Trump himself, but rather the great lengths the new American electorate is willing to go to follow their generals.
Was all of this worth it? Was it worth it for Enrique Tarrio to destroy his life and end up in prison for Donald Trump? What is he thinking about inside federal prison? Does he have any regrets at all? This isn’t the first time Enrique has been behind bars. In 2013, he spent about ten months in jail after being arrested for health care fraud. During one of our conversations in 2019, I asked Enrique about that period:
“That was the most positive experience of my life,” he answered. “I truly believe that you don’t know who you truly are until you have time to yourself, like solitude. You have time to think of the patterns that you’ve made, the mistakes that you’ve made that have put you in that position, that have put you there.”
He kept going. “As soon as I got out it’s like a new set of eyes. You see everything in full color. You appreciate everything.”
I wondered what solitude would look like for Enrique during those twenty-two years in prison. I wondered if he would come out on the other side as a new, better man. Or perhaps this new set of eyes would find even greater conviction in maintaining the status Enrique fought so hard to achieve: General Tarrio, the ultimate white supremacist leader.
* This chapter uses reports published by the Department of Justice that recount the events that led up to and took place on January 6, 2021.