The Underworld Podcast - The Secret Rise of Female Narcos in Latin American Cartels with Deborah Bonello

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Deborah Bonello is a Mexico City-based reporter who's distilled years of reporting on some of the most dangerous women on earth into her new book "Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's Cartels". Deborah spoke to Sean about Lola "La Chata", the first female narco boss in Mexican history, the bathtub violence of Argentine smuggler Yolanda Sarmiento, women in El Salvador's brutal street gangs, and Emma Coronel, El Chapo's buchona wife. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Meesterfer. And every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling, true crime story connected to that exact day in history. From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult, and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think,

how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Hello and welcome to the Underworld podcast. I am your host, Sean Williams. It is spring in the southern hemisphere right now, so you might not detect quite so much depression in my voice for the next few months. And I'm joined today not by Danny Gold, but by reporter and author Deborah Bonello in Mexico City. Deborah is the editorial director for Vice News in Latin America, and for years she's been writing about the role of women in organized crime across the region. And she distilled that this July into her book, Narcass

the secret rise of women in Latin American cartels. We'll put a bunch of links in the show description. It's really, really fantastic. I had a great time reading it, and you should too head out and grab that. Thanks for coming on the show, Deborah. And it's good timing that we're doing this show right now on the news cycle.

Emma Coroner has just been released. Wasn't been announced that she's been... No, she actually has been released from prison, right? So... Yeah. Yeah. So she plays a somewhat prominent role in your book, obviously

the wife of El Chapo and many other aspects of her characters that you bring up in the book. Could you just give us a sort of introduction to who she is and why she was interesting for your project? I mean, I think Emma Coronel

is probably the most visible woman connected to the Sinolawe Cartel and probably the most visible woman connected to organized crime in the world right now. And she was a daily appearance at Chapo's

trial in 2018, 2019. And, you know, she's a very sort of famous person in Mexico as well. And there's a whole fashion movement sort of that based on her, everything from clothes and hair and nails

to the shape of her body and the way that she carries herself, you know. Her figure is actually known as La Bertona figure. the sort of exaggerated boobs and bum and tiny waist. And a lot of people go under the knife here in Mexico and in the US to copy that. So she's very prominent.

But the point I guess I make throughout the book and the reason that I was so interested in her is because she sort of, you know, the interest in her reflects, I think, the way that society places value on women, right? she's attractive, she's connected to a very powerful man. And yes, she did just get out of jail after doing time in the US, but she's far from the highest-ranking woman in the similar cartel. And I, you know, dug into who the highest-ranking woman in the Sinaiolaa cartel was. And her name is practically unknown. And it just seemed to me that, you know, she didn't fit the sort of

stereotype and gender trope that we've become so used to seeing and whose narratives we've become so used to hearing in organised crime and therefore was it's sort of kept out of the limelight and kept out of the understanding of how women moved in organised crime so i so in a way like emma is kind of juxtaposed with these far less famous but infinitely more powerful people or i should say it's not that Emma's not powerful. She is, but the kind of power that she wields is very different to the kind that a lot of the other women in my book wield. You know, she was a very public face, but actually in the day to day, she wasn't terribly fundamental to the way that the Sina Loa Khartar was run, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I just want to get to one of your descriptions of her. You say she's Kim Kardashian meets Mortisha Adams, which is a nice touch. but yeah I've stopped using that because now the Kardashians have thinned down and sort of dropped the big boobs and big bum look so it's a little bit out of but yes

yeah in theory that's that was the comparison I made when I was writing the book two years ago but the Kardashians are sort of changed attack but yes it was accurate and so yeah she's somebody who is prominent through her marriage

to a man who is prominent in the organisation essentially but as you say at the premise of your book is that the sort of the concept of or the idea of women in

organized criminal groups is either as a sort of victim or as somebody who's sexualized and is sort of an accoutrements of the gang itself How quickly did that kind of binary fall away when you began to research the book? It fell away really fast.

There were two women who came onto my radar sort of at the same time as I started looking into this. One was Guadalupe Fernandez Valencia, who is the only woman on the indictment that put Chapo away for life. And the other is a woman called Dignabaya, who worked for the Vaya cartel in Honduras. looked like your sort of typical Latin American abuela, grandmother, both in their late 50s, early 60s. They were part of, you know, clan-based trafficking organizations. They were brought in either by their family members or people who were, you know, people who they were associated with, who were associated with the gang or the cartel. And then, you know, the more I looked, the more I found, like, I did find women who were sort of young and attractive,

that sort of Charlie's angel way that we've come to expect. But they were more the exception than the rule. You know, the majority of women I found were the kind of women who blend into the background and don't draw much attention to themselves. And like, I think it's sort of, you know, as a journalist in Latin America, I've been here for 20 years, I've covered organized crime for 20 years. I'm usually reporting with men when I'm reporting on organized crime. And I think a lot of what we see in the press,

is part of this kind of, you know, male persona created by men who are covering the trade. And I feel like if you look at any sort of Hollywood representation of the mafia, you'll see that there's this very, you know, it's kind of, you know, drug traffickers are by definition male. and since I've started looking into this, I've just sort of started to question how we've come to understand organized crime and how those who are telling the stories of organized crime influence how we understand it.

Yeah, I mean, I guess to go all journalists talking about journalists, like, in my experience covering organized crime is sort of riven through with the same kind of machismo that's on the other side of the coin, I guess. And so much of the image, like you say, the image of the drug trafficker is traditionally male in, you might see Hollywood movies or various books written by blokes usually. Same goes for the journalists reporting them, right? Sure. I mean, I'd ask you anecdotally, you know, in that however many years your podcast has been going,

how many women have you interviewed or how many women have you focused on, you know, as part of your programming. I think I would say charitably a dozen. So, yeah. Right. And you know what? I was at the mob museum about a year ago in Vegas presenting the book and they had this wall that was like made men, right? And there were like, I don't know, 120 faces on there and about four of them were women. And you know, I just think that

so much of the way that organized crime is has stopped us from really being able to see it as it is. Like it's become the sort of stuff of legend. And I understand that there are reasons for that and that audiences need narratives they can relate to and understand and, you know, get excited about. But the point of the book is really that we only understand sort of half of the picture.

And it seemed like a good time to talk about that, given the way that, you know, women's position in society as being elevated, the amount of voices that are being heard, how our concept of gender in general is being questioned, right? I felt like, you know, this is something that people would be able to grasp now, but maybe not a decade ago, because there have been a lot of changes and an evolution in that respect. Yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword of the media believing that it's at the vanguard of

a lot of these social movements and yet being the sort of greatest perpetrator of most of these tropes as well. You say, I mean, it's interesting that you kind of speak about your inspiration for writing the book some of the things that we've just spoken about and then the history of narco-trafficking in Latin America is also not a male, exclusively male thing at all. Now, you mention a few different people in the kind of

long-running history of Latin American crime. One of them is Maria Dolores Estevez Suleta, La Chata, which means flat, which is kind of a strange nickname. She was the first female boss in kind of Mexican criminal history. Could you give us kind of a lowdown of who she was? Yeah, she is featured in a book called Female Drug Traffickers by a historian, Elaine Carey. I drew heavily on her book for that chapter of the book. And she went into, you know, historical archives and what have you. But yeah, I mean, La Chata was an impoverished woman of color who started dealing weed and morphine in the market stall.

She ran with her mom in Mexico City in the Tapita neighborhood. And that was, you know, she was sort of, you know, bossing in the narcotics trade as around the same time that the narcotics trade was born in the 1930s and 1940s. And at one point, she was declared public enemy number one. And she was, you know, straight in the crosshairs of what is now the American DEA. And she was married to a Mexican police officer whose contact and experience helped oil her business. But it was really her and her particular talents and strengths that elevated her to the position of public enemy.

So yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, this is the thing. I think women tend to be treated like such a novelty in the drug business and sort of sexualized and minimalized. It's hard to know whether she was the exception or whether there were other women around her, you know. But certainly she was brought into it by her mother, and there was a pattern of that.

And I saw a pattern of that in the more contemporary traffickers that I saw, that women bring in their daughters as well as their sons to take on. the business and that those maternal relationships are as important as the relationships that traffickers have with the male members of their family. So she was fascinating. And she was, you know, she was also an exception because of her, you know, her race and her socioeconomic position. You know, it's just very difficult for women of her class and color to have access to, you know, job opportunities, social mobility. This continues to be. the case in Latin America, I should mention. I mean, nothing much has changed in that respect in the last

20 years. I think in the last 100 years, sorry, I think it is harder for women to make it. And so, you know, when the Chinese brought opium to Mexico at the turn of the, you know, the beginning of the 920th century, so 1920s, 1930, she saw a job opportunity, a business opportunity and she took it and she excelled. So getting through the 20th century, you mentioned somebody by the name of Yolanda Sarmiento in Buenos Aires,

and she was someone of Chilean descent and a wig shop owner, which is kind of a unique front business for a drug dealing empire. So what was it significant about her? How prominent was she? I mean, I think one thing that women have been really good at

according to prosecutors and criminal defence laws that I've spoken to is they move in this women's world, right? Like there are certain spaces that even today continue to be sort of dominated in controlled by women. You know, street markets is one of them, but, you know, beauty salons, clothes shops, hats shops, like the one she had. And I think women have been really good at recognizing how they're underestimated and that many of these women's spaces. And that many of these women's spaces are just not suspected by law enforcement, which is also predominantly male. And Sarmiento, you know, she ran her wig shop. That's where she had, she did a lot of her business. I think she also was recognized, you know, as Argentina's wine industry took off.

She started to use wine bottles to smuggle cocaine from Argentina to the United States and Colombia, sorry. And yeah, she was also, I think, there's a lot of misunderstanding between women and their relationship with violence too. And I think Salmienta was notoriously violent. I remember there was some point in her story where she was working with her husband and I think they had to dismember a rival

who they had killed and he didn't have the stomach for it and she did. And that kind of shocked and surprised the DEA agents around her. Because I think that's this idea that as a woman, you're not violent and you're not capable of violence. So it wouldn't even cross your mind to be violent. And I found that for many women in the histories and the stories that I researched, violence is just, it's part of the business.

It's a way of making people do what you want, keeping people scared, you know, effective threats are absolutely essential when it comes to illegal businesses. And I think when women realize that they were going to have to use violence in order to further their business interests, then they did it. And this idea that they can't, that they're not capable, I think it's just,

it's relying on this kind of socialization that women have gone through where we're constantly told that we can't, we shouldn't, we mustn't. But, you know, I actually spent a bit of time with the guy who taught Emma Corina how to shoot a gun because after Chapa got extradited, I think she was still in Mexico and she got scared after he was taken out of Mexico

because as long as he was in Mexico, even if he was in prison, he was still a powerhouse. But as soon as he was sent to the US in 2018, no, I think it was 2017, actually. That was it, you know, her sort of, you know, the gloves were kind of off. And so she went to try and learn to shoot a gun

and the guy who taught her how to do that and teaches a lot of women how to defend themselves and or kill said that he feels like when he's teaching women, the most difficult thing to overcome for them is this chip in their head, this switch we have, which is that we don't, we mustn't, we can't, we shouldn't. And that as soon as women can overcome that, then they're as capable or deadly as men. And that, you know, they just kind of have to put their minds to it. And that makes sense to me. Yeah, that was one of sort of many vignettes in this book that was,

was really, really interesting to read about meeting this guy who taught her to shoot. It's interesting you say that because it does come up so much that the law enforcement are completely blindsided by the concept of a woman. Mostly doing violence. I mean, it is that idea that they have been sort of cold-blooded in some way or gone against what the police think of as, I guess, a kind of maternalistic part of female identity or something like this. And it's kind of written through in a few other of the main protagonists of the book, right?

So you've got, we mentioned Dinia Valley as well. She's a kind of incredibly major character in Central American drug trafficking. And she ran a huge cocaine smuggling empire out of a Honduran town called Santa Rosa de Copan, which is on the Guatemalan border. Can you tell us how she got kind of started out and how she rose to become an incredibly influential person in the whole sort of Latin American drug trade. So she was one, I think of, I want to say, like eight or nine siblings, born into, you know, a very poor part of Central America.

I think her family were sort of contraband, they say contrabandistas in Spanish. So, like, you know, they were that contraband specialists. They would smuggle tobacco and alcohol and then cattle. And then, you know, in the 70s and 80s, when cocaine started flowing north from Colombia, it was coming directly through her village over the border into Guatemala. I mean, everything flows from the cocaine-producing countries of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, north essentially to the US. And it was a river that was going to come and someone had to curate and shepherd,

and it was a massive business opportunity for her family. So she and a number of her brothers went into business and started transporting cocaine for the Sinaloa cartel. I remember reading that they were making something like $800,000 per shipment that they were moving across Honduras, because then once it gets into Guatemala, they would pass it on to other transporting mafia. But you see this all over the region

where families like theirs are both respected and feared benefits. factors. So when I went to the little town where she and her family were in control, you know, they had been responsible for creating the Catholic Church. You often see, you know, drug clans like theirs filling vacuums where the state should be. So, you know, in other, investigations that took place in that part of the country, I read the Valles were providing the police with, you know, their gas to make their car. Yeah. That was nuts. Yeah. And you see that a lot across Latin America, where state security is co-opted by organized crime, which often has more money than the state, or spends more money than the state, on these services.

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Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. He says, if I go, if I announce to my superior that my tank's empty or the car isn't working, they'll take a month to put a new battery in and fill the tank. And I'll just go to the valleys and speak to them and I'll have a brand new car in like 24 hours or something. thinks it kind of says everything about the way that border works. Yeah, and I think that's common throughout Latin America. I don't think that's just the case in Honduras. But I think also, you know, in places like Honduras,

Digno what was the owner of coffee plantations and real estate, and, you know, a lot of the money gets sort of fed back into the community in that way, and they become, you know, they become infamous. They become money lenders. They become sort of powerhouses. You know, I remember when I was driving out there with the bishop, who was a few years ago now, but we passed a field and he said that he remembered that a few years before, they had found $11 million buried in barrels in the ground, you know,

like the Valleys were at one point making more money than they knew what to do with, you know? And, you know, that tiny town was littered with these really outsized, mansions compared to the way that most of the normal residents lived. And in fact, just as we rumbled through the entrance, there was a huge unfinished concrete structure to the right, where there was a courtyard in the middle, where they were probably going to put a pool, it was two stories. It was huge.

And there are pictures of it on my social media. And the people that I spoke, he said that that was the mansion that Dignor was building for herself until she got arrested in 2013. And then construction came to a stop because she was taken into custody in the US. And you mentioned this kind of, I guess you hear it a lot all over South America as well, the sort of almost feudal status of a lot of these traffickers and the confusion as to whether they command respect or fear or people love them or they are terrified of them.

And it seems from your trip down there that it was hard to kind of part. that at times, right? People seem, well, her organization went a bit off the rails towards the end as well, I think. She failed to rein in her brothers, wasn't it, who were committing some pretty horrific offences. That's right. And, you know, I think it's a fine line that a lot of trafficking organizations walk throughout Latin America, right? Where they're, you know, they want to be respected and liked and trusted by the community. They buy people's loyal through building churches, giving out food, holding sort of the local religious festivals and what have you.

But I think that as they become, and I think this is what happened to the by-years, the DEA just made up its mind that it was going to dismantle a number of the criminal organizations in Honduras. There was one point where the DEA, the US government stated that it thought at least 80% of the cocaine going up American noses was going through Honduras.

So Honduras was a major transport hub, so they decided to bring down some of those organizations. And I think that happened, and of course the US had to work with the rather questionable abilities of Honduran law enforcement, as well as the Honduran president at the time, who we now know was aiding and abetting the drug cartels at the same time as he was leading the US anti-narcotics push in Honduras.

And I think as the organization sort of came under more press, pressure and the DEA was trying to, you know, put together indictments and what have you and charges against individuals in the Vaya cartel. Loyal and control became even more important to the VALs. You know, they wanted to know who was where, who was doing what, and if there was anyone sort of squeaking to the DEA and working as informants for them, then they wanted them out of the way. And as I write in the book, you know, during the research, I spoke to an asylum seeker who

had fled one of the towns near, or even the town itself, I forget the details, but that that person was, you know, an asylum seeker in the US who came from Digness territory and she had been working as a DEEA informant. And when Dignet found out about that, she apparently sent round a truckload of armed men to get rid of the family. And the DEA immediately transported them out of the country. So, yeah, I mean, she understood the necessity of protecting the buyer's interests, and if that required violence, then she would use it. Yeah, as this kind of news tightens around her,

she becomes increasingly violent, like you say, and snatching at any potential turncoats or weaknesses in the organisation. It's her brothers that end up doing the stuff that the DEA forms the case on. And it's pretty grim stuff that these guys were up to, right? What were they doing? Well, according to people that I spoke to had fled that town, they said that the brothers would round up young girls from the town, take them to their mansions and rape them

and allow them to be raped by the security detail and all the other people who surround the drug traffickers. And that Dignan knew what was going on. They did nothing to stop it. But, you know, as a key part of the organization, she's benefiting from these terror tactics, you know, and those girls are then sent home to their families in pieces. I mean, not literally, but like, you know, I think girls as young as 12, 13, 14. And, you know, their families are told not to report it. Otherwise, there would be consequences.

For people like Dignor, she was benefiting directly from that, from that terror, from that fear that people had of her. because it gave her impunity and it allowed her to do whatever she wanted. So even if she wasn't complicit in it herself in terms of the fact that she wasn't doing those violent acts herself with her own hands, with her own body, she was definitely benefiting from the perpetration of those crimes. So, you know, and the other thing to understand about violence in organized crime is, especially nowadays, most of it is doled out using automatic weapons, not, you know, fisticuffs, as it might have been done, you know,

before firearms became so prevalent all over Latin America. And most of it's delegated. So in the same way we saw Chapo convicted for, I don't know how many homicides, he didn't kill all those people himself, you know. He was sending his people out to do it. You know, in Latin America, Sicariato, contract killing,

is a, you know, a new and booming industry. And so, you know, a lot of the time Dignor wasn't, you know, she wasn't having to do those moders herself. She was delegating them to other people, as were her brothers and as were a lot of her male and female counterparts across the region. So she still probably managed to keep her hands quite clean, you know, in a literal sense, by delegating that violence out.

And give us a flavor of what it's like down there now. I mean, you mentioned all of this obvious product of her largesse over the years sort of revamping this small town on the border. Does she still hold a huge amount of sway? What did the people think when you showed up, you know, asking around in a very small town about this famous incarcerated drug trafficker? So I was down there in 2021. A lot of has happened since then.

At the time, she was in immigration detention, fighting deportation. She didn't want to come straight back to Honduras after she was released from custody. I think during her time in custody, she convinced her son to give himself up. And she was an important cooperator in the hefty sentences handed down to her brothers. But of course, you know, as we know now, the press. president at the time, Juan Orlando and Landers, has since been indicted and extradited to the US to face cocaine charges. And his brother has been convicted for life in the US for cocaine trafficking. So, you know, the fact that she was in the US talking to prosecutors, when Juan Orlando was

still the president of Honduras, it would have been stupid for her to go home. It would have been an immediate death sentence for her to go home because she would have been dropped in a country that has been watching her, you know, tell everything she knows to US prosecutors. So she was smart not to go back. And in fact, she was given the convention, she was given the right to stay in the US under the convention against torture. So she was sitting in, and I believe Houston when I went to El Espiritu. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to run into her and like, you know, the bishop introduced me to the people who live next door, who turned out to be very close friends of hers. I don't know whether they were.

involved in her business, but they certainly knew her and liked her and respected her. And, you know, we're sitting there in the front room chatting and suddenly one of them comes out of the kitchen and she's got digging her on a video phone call. You know, and it was clearly her colleagues and friends there saying, oh, this woman has come asking for you and we're letting you know. And you, and you, she was kind of, sort of, she seems strangely, sort of almost avuncular and, and sort of, friendly, right, when you speak to her briefly. Yeah, she was, she was muted. She seemed sort of tired and, you know, she's now in her early to mid-60s and, you know, she's been, she'd been in detention for the best part of a decade and then she was fighting this deportation

initiative. But I, you know, I was taken by surprise. I didn't expect that at all. I'd asked her through her legal team for interviews a number of times and she'd never, you know, she never responded. She didn't want to talk to me. So I was a little bit anxious about the fact that I was then sitting in the house next door to hers in her, you know, Timpot Town in the middle of nowhere. Like, I'd clearly made a beeline for that place. But she was very, you know, she was very civil and sweet. She was talking about the church and how she'd love me to go see it. Yeah, I wasn't sure she knew who I was at the time. I think she figured it out afterwards because I left a message via the phone that was handed to me with her on it saying, you know, let's talk more.

She never replied. And, you know, at the time, Elisputto looked like the typical Puebloito in Latin America. You know, I would say it was home to three or four thousand people, huge Catholic church, a lot of unpaved streets, tiny shops. selling Coca-Cola and chettos and tortillas everywhere, you know, lots of stray dogs and, you know, the usual, it looked like, it looked very unexhaordinary, apart from, you know, these oversized houses that punctuated. So I have since been told that Dignor has gone home. I suppose after she saw the then-president extradited to the US, she felt safer. I don't know whether it's true. I haven't confirmed it with her people.

In which case, you know, who knows what she's going to do when she goes home. But, you know, she's now in the 60s. It's quite hard to reinvent yourself at that age. You can't be tried for the same crime twice, right? In the US. But I don't know. I can only speculate.

So I'm not going galloping back to Honduras-Lisputu any time soon. But I think her return. And, you know, I did do some asking around about a story I was going to go do in July and sort of postponed which was

the Vaya cartel other members of the cartel who didn't get long sent to this like her brother have also gone home and the Vaya cartel is apparently on the rise again. Now whether that's to do with her, I have no idea, I can only speculate but the point being you know this is the sort of the drug war

and the kingpin strategy this is a key part of it right? Like pulling in key leaders we just saw Ovidio goes man extradited over the weekend, one of Chapo's sons from Mexico. And, you know, he's, we're about to start that circus trial, you know. But what doesn't happen is the, the organizations aren't dismantled. So the organizations aren't dismantled and the cocaine business goes on and on.

You put those people away. The cocaine is shepherded by other people connected to that organization who know the ropes. Then those people go out, get back. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's very cyclical. Yeah. And never anything. know, we saw this too, you know, with the FARC in Colombia, it's probably the clearest example

of how, you know, the piece of course was seen as, you know, because the FARC was an important participant in the cocaine trade. And once the FARC was demobilized, a lot of people thought, oh, well, you know, then the narcotics business is going to dry off. And it's like, I just don't think people understand how viscerally capitalist it is. And the profits and empowerment offered by that trade are so vast that for people, and especially people who are born into communities and regions where there is no option for enrichment, really. I mean, you can do okay, you can do pretty well, but like nothing compared to the money you're going to make from the cocaine business. So it keeps going. It keeps rolling. And people go into prison, they come out, the organizations, you know, they rally, they bring in other people.

But ultimately, the business and the opportunity remains, if you see what I'm saying. Yeah, and actually that's a nice segue into speaking about another major part of your book, which is women in the Marasava Chucha or MS-13 in El Salvador, well, obviously began in the US. It's kind of got a complicated history, but you follow a number of women who are either attached to men within the gang as a sort of protection thing or even romantically. but it wasn't always like that, right?

The MS-13 did have female members until a certain pretty awful moment in the early 2000s. Could you tell us a little more about Brenda Pass and what happened to her and how that changed the role of women in the organisation? That's right. Brenda was a member, I think she was a jumped-in member of the Barrio-Jessiocho gang in, in Houston, if I remember rightly.

It's important, just to backtrack a little bit. You know, the matter became very prominent during the Trump presidency as well, where he was kind of mixing, you know, criminality with immigration and what have you. But it's important to remember that the matter and a lot of the street gangs that we now see in Central America were formed on the streets of the United States and in the prisons of the United States by a lot of of disenfranchised youth from countries that were at war, there were a war like El Salvador. And then when those people were let out of prison,

they were immediately deported home. And in the case of El Salvador, you know, a post-war country, grinding poverty, so much violence, US-funded violence. It took place there during the Civil War. So those were countries that were like this petri dish for criminality. And like, you know, these were, they began as brotherhoods,

and they've sort of metastasized into criminal organizations, as well as, you know, gangs that are now in Honduras and Guatemala. Anyway, when the gangs existed in the US, and they still exist, but when, you know, in the early days, women were very kind of prominent members of those gangs and very respected, and they were getting jumped into the leadership. There was a whole sort of subculture that was surrounded them and, like, fashion and what have you. And Brenda Paz was a young homie who, I believe, was based,

in Houston and she was a member of the Barrio Jesuit yoccho and for reasons that are like probably not worth going into she was she was actually working as a DEA informant against the number of you know in the number of cases that the DEA was trying to construct against other gang members I can't remember the circumstances in which she became a DEA informant but she was put in the witness protection program and for reasons that Samuel Logan goes into in his in his book about her She still went back to sort of hang out with her gang homies. I think, you know, from the outside, it's like, why would you go hang out with your gang of your corporate police, right?

But who knows? I mean, there's some stuff there that didn't rise to the surface. But one day, I mean, the gang clearly knew that she was working as an informant and she was brutally murdered in a park. I think they stabbed her 16 times all over her body. She was in the early stages of pregnancy at the time. And of course, it shocked Americans that that would happen there. But in terms of the gang, it kind of fed this perception that women were more likely to be snitches.

And that belief sort of ricocheted down into Central America, which is, you know, it's Central America as a region is hugely, I mean, what's the word? It's much more viscerally misogynist and macho than the, the United States, you know. Like even with the cartels, which I think lack the ideological basis that the brotherhoods of the gangs lack, you know, the cartels work very much like franchises, corporations of, you know, franchises of corporations, their business institutions, their business organizations, you know, and I think when they see that women can do the jobs that men do,

they're not going to discriminate based on gender, whereas the gangs are a lot more. So parochial. Male. Yeah, parochial and also like misogynistic, you know, the way that they use violence. They have a special type of violence that seems reserved for women, you know,

that's deeply sexualized and kind of medieval. And so when that happened with pass, I think this idea that women were more likely to be informants rippled into Central America. And so women were demoted, punished,

immediately suspect. And there was, this kind of wide scale order that they weren't to be jumped into the gang leadership anymore as a result of that. Can you just give us a, what is jumping in just for people who don't know what that is? Because that's not a nice thing either. So if you want to become an official member of the gang, you have to go through an initiation process.

And for men, that's usually, you know, having your fellow gang members be on you for a number of minutes. And for women, you know, I was told by one woman that you had a choice. You could either choose the beating or you could choose to be raped by other members of the gang, one after the other. And she chooses the beating, right? She, uh, yeah. So Adriana told me that she chose to be beaten instead of raped. And she said it was the longest few minutes of her life. But, you know, it's also important to make the point. There's like, for me, for me, certainly in El Salvador, there's a very different socio-economic reality for the gangs there than they're off the cartels. Like a lot of the foot soldiers of the Mara Salvatruc, you know, the MS-13 and the Barriosziochia are,

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economies of this economic structure you know like not exactly homeless but like people who really are on the poverty line like living you know scraping to get by

like nothing to do with the kind of bling that we see in the in the cartel lifestyle we see what I mean like gangs as survival more than anything else yeah it's much more of a survival structure like of course there are

leaders, the leadership, most of which is in the prisons who, you know, a lot of that wealth filters up to. But we're not talking about the kind of enrichment that you see in the cartels in Latin America. Do you know what I mean?

That's kind of a different organization. And whereas we have seen the gangs sort of chepard loads of loads of cocaine moving through Central America. And I do think that the gangs organize sort of street level sales of drugs within El Salvador and Honduras and Guatamala.

They are not an international criminal organization in the way that the cartels are. They're very kind of limited. So far, they've been pretty limited in their abilities to organize. So I would put them in a different category to the cartels. And I would say the cartels in some way are like quite woke compared to the gangs, like in terms of the opportunities that women appear to have taken and achieved in the cartels compared to the matter. And even Adriana, like, her job was essentially, she was a killer, you know, and those jobs are, they're mostly rival killings, you know, the gang, one part of the gang killing another, killing members of a rival gang. So even though she was officially a homie,

she was by no means like, you know, bossing it the way that we saw Guadalupe and Loose and Dignor another one doing in the cells, I'd say. Yeah, I think from my own experiential point in that region, it's more the odd lieutenant in those organisations gets a chance to sort of skip up and become a cog in the machine, right, for the cartels.

But mostly they're actually two, they're too unpredictable and too chaotic to be of much use to the massive trafficking organizations because they're just so I mean you mentioned in the book a woman Marisha you visit her in prison

she was sentenced to 135 years in prison for kidnapping and murder this is not this she's like unhinged levels of violence some of these street gangs in Central America and she's not she's by far not alone she's not but I

also think, you know, she was embroiled in this like local political bloodspoor essentially. And her family were a powerhouse in her tiny town. You know, when I say powerhouse, you have to put it in the context of these small rural communities. You know, we're not talking about, we're not talking about major cities. We're talking about a small town on the border with El Salvador. where a lot of drug and drugs and product is coming through and container trucks and what have you.

And, you know, her family had been kind of jostling for political power because political power is often criminal power, right? So you control that part of the country. And so anyone who moves stuff through that part of the country has to pay you attacks and, like, create a relationship with you. So that was what Marixir was trying to control. And, you know, her political rival who beat her in the local elections was terrified of her.

And she was eventually incarcerated. And yeah, I did manage to get in to see her. And I spoke to him too, you know, because her allegations were that he had it in for her. And his allegations were that he tried to have him killed three times. One of those attempts on his life happened when she was already in prison. So my point is, like, as is often the case with organized crime, it's quite hard to actually get to what actually happened.

And I got her version, I got his version. I spoke to the anti-narcotics prosecutor and, like, people who knew them both, you know. And it seemed to me that he was terrified of her and he put her away. Or, you know, no, let me rephrase that. It seems to me that he was terrified of her and she was incarcerated for these kidnappings and murders, which she confessed to some of the kidnapping. And she wasn't ashamed of admitting that she had used violence. whether it was 150 homicides.

I mean, it seems like a lot. Yeah. But, you know, you need, when you, when someone needs to be disposed of out the way, you know. So who knows what she, you know, it's hard to know what she's actually guilty of. And like, we know that the justice systems in Latin America are deeply flawed and dysfunctional and corrupt. So all I know is she was a bad girl, but there are probably plenty of other bad girls and bad boys who are enjoying the fruits of their criminal labour on the outside.

You know, like a lot of it was political. Yeah, and it would go, it would seem to sort of at least partly go against this parley that you mentioned in 2005 after Brenda Pass was killed where the leaders of, the gangs seem to come together and say, okay, no more women, because apparently, you know, this is, if one woman snitches, that means that all women are inherently untrustable

or something like this, untrustworthy. What happened there? Right. I mean, it might seem like a small differentiator to our listeners, but for narco nerds like me, there was a huge, like Marixa was moving in the cartel world.

She wasn't moving in the gang world. So I think, I know that seemed like a small distinction, but it's actually pretty massive. It's kind of like comparing, you know, McDonald's to a local burger chain in, in Guatemala. Do you know what I mean? Like the cartels are these transnational criminal organizations with huge amounts of resources and a different culture to the gangs.

And so Marika wasn't moving in the in the gang world. She was moving in the cartel world. And suffice to say, like a few weeks after she was arrested for the second time, because she escaped prison the first time she was arrested, the brother of her political rival, who had won the mayorship in her tiny town, was arrested for when he was found trafficking cocaine on a boat, and like a large amount of cocaine.

Which is all to say, you know, a lot of, the elites have their hand in the game. Yeah. Okay, he was the president of the mayor, not the mayor himself, but you see what I'm saying. Trafficking is usually clan-based. So, but then again, even though she wasn't in the gang and she was working on the, on the drug trafficking side, she was still, um, she was still kind of violating the gender tropes that exist in her part of the world.

You know, these are deeply rural, parochial societies. her sister who end up being assassinated before her, before she took power or she tried to take power, was also had a reputation for being very violent and ruthless. And that's very unusual, you know, like, I think there is this tendency for us to perceive women as much more submissive, less ambitious, less antagonistic. And both Marixa and her sister, Myra, just usurped all of that.

And I wonder how more, I wonder if it's much more common than we think. You know, it's really hard to know for all the factors that we've discussed, like how common it is for women to be, you know, at the forefront of these kinds of families and the forefront of these kinds of activities. But I suspect it's much more common than we think. And, you know, in my investigation for the book, I was really limited by the fact that it's really hard to dig into the criminal histories of women who are incarcerated in Latin America.

There's very little access to information. There's very little information to have access to. Whereas if women have been through the US justice system, you know, you go to PACER and you download everything that you need and you control through conversations that happen in courtrooms and criminal complaints, and what have you. You know, there's so much information to construct narratives and understand scenes. And so I think there are lots more women who are, you know,

incarcerated in Latin America, active in Latin America in criminal organizations that just managed to remain invisible because they haven't come onto the radar of US law enforcement. And quite honestly, it's really the DEA who does the deep dives into organized crime in Latin America, with a few exceptions. But the way it works, you know, they'll go to like Guatemala and they'll say to the anti-narcotics prosecutor Guatemala, we want this person, can you arrest them?

And they'll arrest them. But there might not even be charges against that person in that country. We see what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you, I mean, your book came out in July. So I'll say the title again. It's NACAS, The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's cartels.

And you do, you're writing regularly for Vice and you have a substack as well on the subject that people will leave various links in the description for the show. what are you kind of working on at the moment then have you got any trips coming up or any any stories that you're sort of deep in the middle of yeah i'm i'm well i'm having a lot of conversations about um what if anything comes next from the book so podcast possibility documentaries um i have a novel in the works that's based on a female journalist protagonist in latin america who covers the carse out queens and has to sort of break bad to get himself out of trouble.

Yes. And yeah, I'm also planning a trip back to Honduras. I don't know whether it was on your radar, but a couple of months ago, there was a massacre in a women's prison in Honduras where basically a bunch of Barrio Giacioteu women slaughtered women from the MS-13 gang. You know, most of the prisons in Latin America

are home to gangs, and the gangs tend to live in different cells and live different parts of the prison. But for some reason, this war broke out, this massive massacre happened, and I'm wondering whether I can sort of use that story to dig down a little bit more deeply into how women are moving within the matter in Central America

and whether there is any real emancipation going on or whether it's just ground-level stuff. But I'm just fascinated by, you know, especially like as a reporter, like, you know, Latin America and like my experience as a woman reporting here has been, has seemed very inappropriate to people. So I can only imagine how women moving in that world move through it. And I think one of the strange things about the book was because a lot of the women I was covering were trying to get immigration status in the US at the time. it was really hard to sit down and talk to them. You know, immigration judges do not look kindly on women boasting about the criminal exploits if they're trying to get green cards or S-Vis or the rights of work.

So I would really love to speak to more women with that kind of experience to sort of understand, you know, what the day-to-day was and how it was to, like, move through what we believe to be very male worlds, right? but I feel like I don't know enough about that yet. So I'm definitely going to be sticking to the women and crime narrative, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's such a rich vein. And I mean, reading your book, which is wonderful, everyone should get it. It struck me how many TV shows and dramas and movies are made about pretty boring men in organized crime

when there are so many amazing characters in your book alone who could provide the basis of, you know, such incredible documentaries, movies, whatever you want. So, yeah, maybe Hollywood is also just as misogynist as any other parts of society, which I'm sure it is. Oh, without a doubt. I mean, one of the challenges of, you know, I'm having a lot of conversations about possible screen manifestations,

stations of Narakas. It's like there's this desire to sort of squeeze women into these male narratives, right? So like the female chapeau or the female Escobar. But I do think, you know, things like Ozark, things like Peaky Blinders, I think both of those series really kind of pioneered new, new roles and new voices for women and new, gave them sort of new places in our understanding of organized crime. And I'm really excited to see Griselda, which is based on Griseldo Blanco, the Colombian drug trafficking patriarch from the 70s and 80s. That's due out on Netflix in the next couple of months, I think.

And that's produced by Sophia Vergara's production company. And, of course, she's Latina and, like, very much understands the culture that she comes from, you know, in Latin America. So I'm hopeful and curious to see how they represent her, you know, whether they try and squeeze. are into this male trope or whether they come up with something a bit more

novel and like new and pioneering. I don't know. I haven't seen any I haven't seen any like takes from the from the series yet but I'm excited to see it and I do think you know in a way Hollywood gives people what they want but like it also it also can break new ground like you know there's so much changing in terms of like the relationship between extremers and writers and whatever,

you know, Hollywood's kind of at Stan's still right now because of this strike. But I do think, you know, I am, I do think that maybe audiences are a little sick of seeing women portrayed in that way. And actually one of the things that really annoyed me about Narikos, Mexico, was how, you know, you did have an Eddie Narehani, Felix, or the woman based on her,

who was part of the Felix Ariano family. But then, you know, the other, trafficker, who I think was probably based on Sandra Avela Beltran, who's also in my book, who was ridiculously good-looking, ridiculously sexual, and then like just kind of sidelined. And I felt like maybe people are just a bit sick of that, and like they do understand that it's much more complex and nuanced, and, you know, women's power isn't just about their sexuality and their ability to, you know, ingratiate themselves. styles with people, like, they do actually have brains and business acumen and what have you.

So I wonder, like, I do think, like, smart producers in Hollywood and the streaming world are probably thinking, yeah, like, as Ozark did, you know, we need to produce female characters that are just a lot more nuanced. Yeah. I feel like so many screen adaptations of women in crime, it doesn't actually take them out of that trope, it just sort of laser focuses it, almost like the gangster who loves his mummy kind of character, but the matriarch is loving, but only to her son,

and therefore is like somehow duplicitous, but it's not really stepping out of that trope at all. It just kind of focuses it on men in the woman's life, I guess. And as you say, a lot of boring men, you know. Now, it may well be that a lot of these women are quite boring too. Like, who knows, I do think a lot of what we think happens in the drug trade is based on kind of, you know, Hollywood fantasy in a way.

Like, so I don't know, you know, but I think in this climate and the way that gender is being framed nowadays, I think that audiences are ready to understand. And this is the sealer line from the historian Elaine Carey who wrote the historical account of women in the drug trade, like women aren't just standing at the stove, stirring the sauce. Like, they're actually very involved. If you think about the dad in your own family and in your, you know, your mom and dad's

relationship or what have you, even if the man is the breadwinner, it's not as if he's making all the decisions. I mean, that certainly wasn't the case in the Mediterranean families that I grew up with. You know, it was very much like a very equal decision-making process. and the women are very kind of strong and forthright and capable, you know. So I think we just have to kind of open our eyes a little bit and just be a little bit less kind of stuck to these tropes and narratives. Because those are sort of the surprising, unusual narratives that I think have potential these days.

You know, who wants another narcos Mexico and another narco series? It's like the same thing again, right? You know, I keep hearing about how women's voices, women's stories, women's perspectives are kind of the thing in the coming years. So let's hope it gets some traction there. Yeah, for sure. Well, good luck with all of that. That sounds like a lot on your plate.

And thanks so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm delighted, and I'm keen to hear what your listeners think. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it, Compliance.

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