ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  She marries Alberto Bravo, but when he goes to Colombia on a work trip and she doesn’t hear from him for a while, a furious Griselda catches up with him and kills him in a shootout. By 1971 Griselda has her own narco-trafficking network in the United States. She has understood that the line connecting New York, Miami, and Colombia is the future. She has a lingerie shop in Medellín, where she sells her own designs, which she also has her mules wear. They’re the ones who hide 2 kilos of cocaine under their clothes on the Colombia–United States flight. Her name appears in the DEA files for the first time in 1973. She’s described as “a new threat for the United States.” Business is booming; she’s now one of the most important Colombian traffickers. Despite being a woman—no small handicap in a society where there’s no feminine version of the word “narco-trafficker”—Griselda proves to her Colombian colleagues that she can do the job and do it with such violence that she terrorizes people. Her reputation as a wicked woman without scruples precedes her everywhere she goes.

  In 1975 she is accused of drug trafficking as part of an investigation in New York, but she manages to take refuge in Colombia. She has already amassed a fortune, $500 million. She returns to the United States a few years later, when things have calmed down, this time to Florida. She founds the Pistoleros, her own army of killers. Among them is Paco Sepúlveda, who slits his victims’ throats and then hangs them upside down until the blood has drained out: “The bodies are lighter that way, and it’s easier to move them.”

  The stories about Griselda multiply: hypochondriac, druggie, bisexual, lover of orgies, paranoid, collector of luxury goods. Along with the rumors that feed the myth, Griselda starts collecting nicknames: Godmother, the Queen of Cocaine in Miami, the Black Widow. It’s rumored that she slit the throat of some men she’d gone to bed with. She gets married four times, always to narco-traffickers. Marriage is a lever for moving up in the hierarchy of power, and when a husband puts a spoke in her wheels, she has him eliminated. Like Dario Sepúlveda, who contests the custody agreement for their son, whom they named, of all things, Michael Corleone, and so she has him killed.

  Griselda’s drug empire in Miami takes in $8 million a month. She plays a fundamental role in what will be called the Florida Cocaine War, also known as the Cocaine Cowboys War. Miami is flooded in money, estimated at about $10 billion a year.

  In 1979 Griselda orchestrates the Dadeland Mall massacre. Two people are killed in a liquor store in that Dade County mall: Germán Jiménez Panesso, a Colombian drug trafficker who does business with Griselda’s organization, and who is the target of the shootout, and his bodyguard. In the 1970s homicides were a private matter. Sure, there were tortures, stranglings, mutilations, decapitations. But they were ways to settle the score. The Dadeland massacre signals instead the beginning of a long series of shootouts in Miami, of battles fought in public places, in the light of day. So-called collateral damage doesn’t matter anymore. Now people are shot in the street, in shopping malls, stores, restaurants, crowded locales at the busiest times of day. It is said that Griselda is responsible for the majority of murders committed in southern Florida during that time.

  Griselda’s ruthlessness reaches epic proportions. Numerous episodes, told as if part of a legend, are passed from one person to the next.

  Griselda walks into a bar just for men. Girls are dancing provocatively on their platforms. All heads turn to look at her. A woman who comes into a place like this? Unheard of. What’s more, a woman who looks like that: stoned, slovenly, haunted eyes. She sits down, orders a drink, observes the gyrating bodies. She seems about to touch those long legs. Then all of a sudden she gets up and fires a gun. One by one the girls fall to the ground. “Whores!” she screams. “Whores! All you know how to do is wiggle your asses for the men.” Griselda is obsessed with those women. For her they don’t deserve to live. Another obsession is hunting in bars. She liked to choose her men, and if they didn’t go along, they were dead. One time a kid, younger than her, sitting a few tables away, attracts her attention. Griselda wants him and fixes her eyes on him. He avoids her gaze, but Griselda insists. So the kid heads to the bathroom, and she follows, going into the women’s room. “Help!” she starts screaming. “Help!” and the kid comes running; maybe that weird woman is sick. Griselda is waiting for him, naked from the waist down. “Lick me,” she commands. The kid steps away, his back to the door, but Griselda takes out a pistol and repeats, “lick me.” So he does, the barrel of her gun glued to his head.

  Griselda holes up in her bedroom, looked after by her German shepherd, Hitler; she’s a drug addict by this point. Drugs and the police are only two of her enemies. Rival organizations try to kill her several times. On one occasion she tricks her killers by staging her own death: She ships an empty coffin to Colombia from the United States. In 1984, to escape the continual attacks, she moves her base to Irvine, California, where she lives with her youngest son, the aforementioned Michael Corleone. But she is arrested in February 1985, right in Irvine, accused of drug trafficking by the DEA. She is sentenced to ten years in prison, but even as an inmate she continues to manage her affairs. The Godmother buys herself a luxury prison. From behind bars she comes up with new projects, such as the one—aborted, thanks to wiretappings—to kidnap John F. Kennedy, Jr. In prison she receives jewels, perfume, men.

  The Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney pressures one of her right-hand men, Jorge “Riverito” Ayala, to collaborate, and in 1993 he agrees. They gather sufficient proof to incriminate Griselda for multiple homicide. But it’s 1998, and the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney is about to be buried in scandal. The man who turned on Griselda is in a witness protection program. He can’t take it anymore. The life of luxury and drugs he’d been used to is now just a distant memory, and all the discipline is killing him. He finds a way to put a lot of money into the hands of the DA secretaries. He doesn’t want information or cocaine or an escape plan. The money is for sex. Telephone sex, but for him it’s still sex. The heavy breathing and moans go on for a while, but in the end an inquiry uncovers the secret hotline, and the DA’s authority is undermined. The scandal saves Griselda, who escapes the electric chair as a result. She is freed on June 6, 2004, after almost twenty years in prison, and sent back to Colombia.

  September 3, 2012: Griselda, now sixty-nine, is coming out of a butcher shop in Medellín with a friend. Two men on a motorcycle pull up and shoot her twice in the head. The Godmother dies in the hospital a few hours later, killed via the same technique—motorcycle murder—that she herself imported to Miami.

  Or take the story of another woman, Mexican this time: Sandra Ávila Beltrán, queen of cocaine. And a sentence I couldn’t get out of my head: “The world is disgusting.” Sandra couldn’t stand hearing that sentence. And if it was uttered by one of her uncle’s men, who was none other than El Padrino Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Sandra felt the blood rush to her head and pound against her temples. Born into a narco family, raised in the presence of the greatest of them all, immersed in a macho culture since she was a little girl: How could it be that those same men who boasted in front of her uncle about their female conquests and their barbaric slayings of enemies, amongst themselves then would say “The world is disgusting”? Braggarts in front of the boss, cowards as soon as he turned his back. And if little Sandra happened to hear them, well, it really didn’t matter much; she was just a girl.

  Education is often the drop of water that wears away the stone. Patient and tenacious, El Padrino’s lackeys’ words dig into Sandra’s conscience. They make their way deep down, creating an emptiness that can no longer be resolved with simple rage. She has to look for other answers. She has to find a lifestyle that contradicts that inescapable sentence. Sandra divides the world into two categories. On one side are people like her uncle’s men. On the other are those who want to change the world, to win. She can boast of her birthright, the ideal genetic résumé for a narco-trafficker. But she’s
a woman; her body bears the indelible mark of the ineptness of command. Breasts, wide hips, an ass like a mandolin. These things can’t be erased, can’t be passed off as something else. So breasts, wide hips, and mandolin ass become weapons to hone, things she can depend on: fingernails, shoes, hair, perfume, clothes. For Sandra they are all necessary to make her femininity—her sensuality and power—explode. Because the more woman she is, the more the men are going to have to pay attention to her. The very logic that is used against her, to subjugate her femininity, she will bend to her advantage, and will teach all women that there is another way to live in the world.

  Men are pawns, to be classified by their usefulness. Sandra gets sentimentally attached to two federal judicial police commanders, long a breeding ground for narcos. Then she moves on to seducing important Sinaloa bosses such as El Mayo Zambada and Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel. And finally the big coup: She gets engaged to Juan Diego Espinoza Ramírez, known as El Tigre, or the Tiger. Diego is a Colombian narco belonging to the Norte del Valle cartel and the nephew of Don Diego, the famous narco Diego Montoya. Sandra is a princess, constantly choosing whom to tie herself to so as to rise in power and social standing. With El Tigre she makes a qualitative leap that allows her to negotiate directly with the Colombian suppliers. So Sandra, El Padrino’s niece, becomes la Reina, the Queen. The Queen of the Pacific knows how to exploit clichés. A woman is weak, so there’s no point in threatening her: For the Queen this means freedom of movement. A woman doesn’t know how to negotiate with men: The Queen takes advantage of the cartel emissaries’ embarrassment when faced with a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress.

  Now they all have to kneel to her, honor her. She coordinates shipments from Colombia from her luxurious headquarters in Guadalajara and launders the earnings, which get bigger every year. All that money is needed to carry out her most ambitious plan: to give women power. According to the Queen, women need to earn approval and respect, and the fastest, surest way to do that is through beauty. She invests the proceeds from cocaine in beauty clinics, both deluxe and plain, because all women have the right to lovers and husbands, jobs and suitable social standing. It’s tangible things she invests in. Bodies and buildings. Breasts and houses. Derrieres and villas. Smooth skin and apartments. Seated on her throne, Sandra rules an army of men who can climb the ranks only to a certain point, because above them, undisputed, is the silent Queen, who never exposes herself, never gets her hands dirty, does not allow her name to appear in the newspaper or, worse, in police reports.

  Then one day everything changes. An important shipment has just arrived in the port of Manzanillo, in the state of Colima, on the Pacific: ten tons of cocaine worth more than $80 million. The authorities block it and seize the drugs. For the first time the Queen’s name appears in the media. She is now a public figure, and it may not be pure coincidence that a few months later her only son, sixteen-year-old José Luis Fuentes Ávila, who lives in the exclusive Puerta de Hierro neighborhood in Guadalajara, is kidnapped. His captors demand $5 million in ransom. The Queen panics. The only man that really matters to her is in the hands of ruthless killers who threaten to skin him alive. She goes to the authorities. But that turns out to be a serious mistake, because from that moment on the police monitor her phone calls and movements. Which is how they discover that the ransom was paid directly by El Mayo Zambada, because after the shipment was seized in the port of Manzanillo, the Queen is short on cash.

  While the Queen embraces her son again after seventeen days in captivity, AFI commander Juan Carlos Ventura Moussong announces that he has proof that the kidnapping was a setup to weaken the Queen’s power. Is it really credible that the son of one of the most important bosses can be kidnapped like that? For Moussong, those responsible must be sought among the Queen’s own men, who are eager to construct an independent microcartel and, above all, to free themselves of that woman. The AFI director’s suspicions are valid, but a short time later he is killed, shot point-blank on the street while coming back from a meeting with the other federal district commanders.

  Still, power such as hers cannot easily be defeated, even when it is forced between the walls of the female prison in Santa Martha Acatitla, on the outskirts of Mexico City. It’s here that the Queen of the Pacific ends up after being snagged by the police in a fancy Thai restaurant, eating lunch with her companion El Tigre. She’d been going about incognito and using a fake name for years. After her son’s kidnapping, things got more difficult for her, but that doesn’t mean she is going to give up dining in expensive restaurants or buying the latest Chanel outfit. “I’m a housewife who earns a living selling clothes and houses.” In prison she carries on doing what she has always done: fighting for women’s emancipation. She teaches her cell mates not to neglect their bodies or their looks even in prison. “If you lose your body, you lose your soul. If you lose your soul, you lose your power. If you lose your power, you lose everything,” she keeps telling her new “affiliates,” and she tries to set a good example. Apparently she even infects the prison director—a woman. One day some doctors are caught bringing Botox into the prison. The guards immediately think it’s for that prisoner who is obsessed with beauty, for the Queen and her new friends. Not true: The Botox is for the prison director. The Queen managed to convince even her that sensuality comes first, before everything else. Sandra parades in the hallways, showing off her big, dark, movie star glasses, and she never complains: never an attack of nerves; never a hysterical crying fit; never a protest other than for the slop the prison guards pass off as food. The Queen smiles at her misfortune and keeps fiery looks for the women who dare to complain to her about the world’s injustice: “If it’s disgusting to you, then change it!”

  August 10, 2012: Sandra Ávila Beltrán is extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges. But at the end of the trial all but one charge is dropped: providing money to her boyfriend, El Tigre, to help him avoid arrest. She is sentenced to seventy months in prison, a term she had already served almost entirely in her previous incarceration in Mexico. In August 2013 she is deported to Mexico, where she is immediately taken into custody in a penitentiary in Nayarit on money-laundering charges. But just after a few months a Mexican federal judge throws out a five-year sentence for money laundering, using the argument that she has already been tried for the same crime in both Mexico and the United States, and orders her immediate release. On February 7, 2015, at 10 P.M., the Queen leaves prison: Three SUVs are waiting for her outside. She climbs into one of them, a white BMW X5, and drives away. She is free. Will she go back to her throne?

  • • •

  Then there’s the story of a very special recipe.

  “El Teo would bring me the corpses. I’d have everything ready: barrels, water, a hundred pounds or so of caustic soda. Latex gloves, gas mask. I’d fill the barrels with fifty gallons of water and two bags of caustic soda and heat them up. When the mix started to boil, I’d strip the bodies and throw them in. Cooking time’s about fourteen, fifteen hours. In the end all that’s left is the teeth, but it’s easy to get rid of those.”

  The originator of this recipe is Santiago Meza López, nicknamed, not coincidentally, El Pozolero. Pozole is a typical Mexican meat stew. El Pozolero had long been on the FBI’s twenty most wanted list, and was arrested in January 2009. He confessed to dissolving three hundred bodies of members of a rival gang. The Tijuana cartel paid him six hundred dollars a week. Teodoro García Simental El Teo, head of a bloodthirsty gang tied to the Tijuana cartel, delivered the corpses and the cash.

  “Never a woman, though. Only men,” El Pozolero insisted at the end of his interrogation.

  • • •

  Stories, stories, stories. I can’t get away from them. Stories of people, of torturers and victims. Stories of reporters who would like to tell about them and sometimes end up dead. Like Bladimir Antuna García, who had become a ghost of his former self. Haggard, prematurely gray around the temp
les and beard, which only took half a day to grow in. His weight fluctuated; his physique went haywire: two sticks instead of legs, protruding stomach. The prototypical drug addict. A consequence of his work, because Bladimir knew how to tell stories, and knew how to investigate, a difficult occupation in a place like Durango. He had crawled through the grimiest canals, the ones that collect wastewater stories, stories of sewers and of power. But those stories start to gnaw at your insides, you slam into the disgust, and when you can’t understand it, you trip, and then look for an explanation elsewhere. Whiskey and cocaine seemed like the solution. But Bladimir decided to leave all that behind; he wanted to go back to being considered one of the best reporters in Durango. He cleaned himself up, found work as a busboy in a tavern in the center of town. He did everything. Humble tasks, but not for Bladimir, who, thanks to his stories, had discovered just how ephemeral the boundaries of human dignity are. Meanwhile he tried to get back into the world of journalism. But the editors didn’t want anything to do with him; he was too unreliable, too well known, but for the wrong reasons. Sure, he’d been a talented reporter, but what if they found him crouched over a table again, his nose buried in a line of cocaine? For people who’ve seen you messed up, even if it was only once, you’re always a drunkard and an addict. But a new paper opened in Durango, El Tiempo, edited by Víctor Garza Ayala. The paper wasn’t doing so well. Maybe some crime stories, which readers really love, could help turn things around. Garza decided to hire Bladimir to cover the crime beat, but just in case, he relegated his section to the back, to the back page, so as not to cut into the politics section on the front page, which is what really matters to him. It’s that way all over the world. If a judge is killed or a car bomb explodes, the story conquers the most important pages. Otherwise crime gets relegated to the back. But Bladimir didn’t care; what mattered to him was the chance to start writing again, writing about cartels and the Zetas. And avoiding, at least at first, causing too much of a stir. But at a certain point the newspaper vendors started displaying the paper backward, with the last page in full view. Sales went through the roof.