Source – thestar.com
- “…“We prefer to tell ourselves that women are coerced and co-opted into committing crimes,” Bonello writes. “The existence of bad, evil, deviant women who have the audacity to step out of the accepted gender roles of mothers, caretakers, homemakers, and nurturers to (also) smuggle and sell drugs threatens the very basis on which many civilizations are built.”
SM:…What?,…that women are somehow immune from the seductive lure of money & power is counter-intuitive & quite plainly absurd….choke this one up to “toxic femininity’…..
Inside the world of ‘Narcas,’ the women taking power in the Latin American drug trades
Author and journalist Deborah Bonello describes a world were women are not just “victims or mothers” but have risen to become powerful forces in the cartel world.
By Peter Edwards
It’s an obvious question and one that has to be asked.
Does journalist Deborah Bonello worry about her security, especially with the launch this month of her book “Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels”?
“My Mom worries about this a lot,” says Bonello, a VICE News journalist who has covered the drug trade in Latin America for 15 years. “As a journalist, there is often a discomfort there,” she understates in an interview from Mexico.
Bonello admits to sometimes having dark thoughts of her own, but she shakes them off — drug lords have “probably got better things to think about and worry about.”
“Narcas,” published this year by Beacon Press, contains character sketches of scores of powerful women in the drug trade in Central America and Mexico, including Digna Valle, of Honduras, who “helped bring down her entire trafficking clan and, possibly, a former president”; Luz Irene Fajardo Campos, who moved massive quantities of Colombian cocaine and Mexican meth “without a man by her side and without resorting to violence”; and Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, of Mexico, who “operated in the high-ranking shadows alongside infamous and powerful men in the Sinaloa Cartel, including Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán and his sons.”
“Narcas” calls to mind “The Godmother; Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women,” by Barbie Latza Nadeau, which tells of prominent women in Italy’s Mafia, including Assunta (Pupetta) Maresca.
(Added By SM)
Bonello, a self-confessed “narco nerd,” documents how women are taking on an increasing role in the operation of international drug cartels.
To do so, she interviews women like “Brenda,” whom Bonello interviewed in a prison in Guatemala City. Brenda said she wasn’t drawn into the drug trade primarily by the money.
“I liked the danger,” Brenda told Bonello.
There’s also “Maria,” whom Bonello met in a barrio in Mexico City and who ran guns from Texas into Mexico for cartel buyers for 20 years.
She “loved the adrenaline.”
Bonello also spoke by phone with Valle, the matriarch of a criminal clan from El Espíritu, Honduras. Valle’s family started as cattle and contraband smugglers before a 20-year run moving cocaine. In their conversation, Valle proudly mentioned the church she helped construct in her hometown.
“Did you like the church?” Valle asked the author.
“Loved it,” she replied.
In their conversation, Valle spoke of returning home, even though it was widely reported that she had co-operated with authorities in the U.S., making her a logical target for others in the underworld.
“Ovaries of steel or bravado?” Bonello writes. “There was no way of knowing.”
Bonello notes that the number of women behind bars in Central America and Mexico has shot up, reflecting the increased female participation in the drug trade. “In the case of Guatemalan prisons like the Santa Teresa, the female population has grown sixfold, from 433 behind bars in 2001 to 2,923 in prison in 2020,” she writes.
The statistic reflects how women are gaining power in drug cartels. It also challenges longstanding tropes about women and crime.
“We prefer to tell ourselves that women are coerced and co-opted into committing crimes,” Bonello writes. “The existence of bad, evil, deviant women who have the audacity to step out of the accepted gender roles of mothers, caretakers, homemakers, and nurturers to (also) smuggle and sell drugs threatens the very basis on which many civilizations are built.”
“Smart women employ the gendered tropes to their advantage,” Bonello writes, quoting American crime historian Elaine Carey. “This has helped when being prosecuted. They are the ‘victim.’”
Such stereotypes simply don’t hold up in the real world, Bonello argues.
In “Narcas,” women are “multidimensional beings — not just victims or mothers, not just vulnerable or submissive. But simplistic stories that revolve around stereotypical heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators are seductive. They form the backbone of countless narratives in the media and in daily life. But in my experience, those binaries do not reflect human nature.”
Bonello notes there’s a longstanding precedent for women being involved in drug cartels. Female drug-runner María Dolores Estévez Zuleta was dubbed Mexico’s “public enemy No. 1” back in 1945.
Whether narco women are mothers, sisters, aunts, wives, lovers, or grandmothers, they certainly aren’t just sitting there “stirring the sauce,” as Carey puts it. Women have been working in central roles in the dope business for as long as it has existed. And some of them have had criminal careers that spanned several decades and multiple criminal organizations.
In current times, the late Griselda Blanco Restrepo supplied massive amounts of cocaine to New York from Medellín, Colombia. She was so enamoured with the gangster lifestyle that she named her son “Michael Corleone,” after the Al Pacino character in the “Godfather” movies.
“She was a fast learner, and adaptable,” Bonello writes. “After marrying a smuggler, she started off in the human smuggling business and learned how to forge documents. She then moved into the cocaine trade, which boomed, and is also rumoured to have mentored Pablo Escobar.”
Bonello writes that she’s left to wonder how many more powerful women there are in the drug trade, beyond those in the pages of her book.
“Much as the women in today’s licit, legal world are taking on more prominent roles and higher profiles, it’s logical that such a trend should also be reflected in the criminal underworld,” she writes.
“I hope that throwing light on their criminal careers will help to dispel some of the myths and gender stereotypes about women in the drug cartels and create new narratives and conversations regarding las patronas of Latin America.
Not surprisingly, Bonello is a fan of the Netflix crime series “Ozark,” with its “real, gritty, unexpected part women play in organized crime,” including matriarch Darlene Snell.
“Darlene scared the f— out of me,” Bonello says. “I thought they just stole the show — were very human.”
Peter Edwards is a Toronto-based reporter primarily covering crime for the Star.
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