Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  This book is dedicated to my maternal grandparents. From Spanish murmurs, songs, poems, jokes, and political conversation and for his continued support and interest in my work on Latin America and even the feminist “stuff,” this book is dedicated to my grandfather James Gerard Stofer. He represents the greatest generation: a multilingual high school dropout and a survivor of Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway who evolved into a Wharton man and a corporate warrior. He was also a theater collective member, actor, and lover of art, music, and history. His life companion, also from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the late Marie Joan Curley Stofer, my grandmother, too was part of that greatest generation: working as an accountant in factories during World War II, crossing the country to see her Brooklyn boy when he was stateside, and supporting my grandfather while he pursued his education and career. She explained to me that during the war she held her best job as a financial officer at an armaments factory, a job she never held again. After the war, she worked in banking but continually trained men who went on to take the jobs that in another time and place would have been hers. Their examples have taught me about perseverance.

  INTRODUCTION

  SELLING IS MORE OF A HABIT

  Women and Drug Trafficking, 1900–1980

  ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2007, MEXICO CITY POLICE CAPTURED Sandra Ávila Beltrán while she was driving her BMW in a plush part of the city. Dubbed “la reina del Pacífico” (the queen of the Pacific) after the title of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s best-selling novel La reina del sur (The Queen of the South), her shocking personal tales of cocaine trafficking, sexual conquests, and the kidnapping of her child were followed by the press.1 That she came from drug royalty only added to the titillation, since her power derived from her familial network. Ávila is the niece of both Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Juan José Quintero Payán, two of Mexico’s most prominent drug traffickers.2 According to newspaper and television reports, Ávila sashayed about the police station wearing tight jeans and demanding time to fix her hair and makeup for her mug shot. Her beauty and numerous conquests seemed more fiction than reality. Prior to her arrest, she had been wed to several high-ranking police officers while carrying on affairs with prominent drug traffickers. Journalists reported that her ex-husbands, the police officers, always ended up dead.

  A couple of weeks after Ávila’s arrest, a spokesperson for the attorney general of Chihuahua, Mario Ruíz Nava, stated that the police had killed “la güera polvos” (Snow White), Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiversos, on October 7, 2007. The police in Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, and southern New Mexico were familiar with Carvajal, who operated from Palomas, Chihuahua, which borders Columbus, New Mexico.3 Carvajal trafficked cocaine and people through that major overland port with impunity. She had sealed her notoriety in 2004 when she led a group that ransacked the police station in Palomas.

  In 2007, these two high-profile incidents occurring within two weeks of each other suggested a disturbing shift in the world of drug trafficking in the dawn of the new century: women were important to the drug trade. The two women displayed distinct forms of agency within the world of narcotics. Ávila had gained her power due to her familial and communal contacts with founders of what became known as the Sinaloa cartel. Her ties to such men allowed her to benefit financially, but she also created legitimate business ventures such as nail salons and clothing boutiques. Carvajal was a female boss who led a group of men along the U.S.-Mexico border.4 She, too, had gained access to power due to her relations with men, but she had taken the extraordinary step of showing her power over men within her organization as well as within a local police force. La reina del Pacífico fits the image of the sexy lover, wife, or companion of numerous drug traffickers and police agents, yet she is also a member of a notorious crime family.5 These familial relations gave her access to resources and power that most women never enjoy, but her connections ensured her desirability among men, who viewed her as a conquest or business partner. Carvajal rose to prominence in illicit trade, not as a child of a criminal family but as a means to survive and raise herself and her children out of poverty. Both biographies demonstrate the quotidian practices within the trade and the complexities by which women participate in illicit flows of narcotics.

  The sensationalism that surrounds such cases distorts the trade at its most basic element. Women have always been part of the drug trade despite their fetishized representations in popular culture, such as in the television series Weeds. There, doe-eyed Mary-Louise Parker plays Nancy, an upper-middle-class housewife who resorts to drug peddling when her husband dies. Melodramatic films like María Full of Grace, Traffic, Blow, and Scarface offer female protagonists, often as secondary characters who reinforce popular notions of women as mules or as lovers of prominent drug lords. In María Full of Grace, Catalina Sandino Moreno as María Álvarez escapes poverty by serving as a cocaine mule to provide for her family. In Traffic, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a wife left destitute when her husband is implicated in drug trafficking. She turns to his business to make ends meet. Mirtha Jung, played by Penélope Cruz in Blow, is similar to Ávila, a reina with ties to the Colombian drug oligarchy. In the 1983 Scarface, Michelle Pfeiffer depicts the beautiful lover, Elvira Hancock, who is lured by the wealth and lifestyle of Tony Montana.6

  Earlier studies of narcotics and drug trafficking that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s rarely mentioned women, but a few scholars considered how women were connected to the trade as addicts, mules, lovers, or victims.7 More recently, scholars of the present—anthropologists, criminologists, and sociologists—have begun to systematically study women as important actors with a multiplicity of roles in the global flows of drugs.8 Women play key roles as bosses, money launderers, and couriers as well as mules and addicts.

  In this study, my approach to women and drug trafficking is historical. Rather than interviewing women or observing them over a period of years, I sought them in written records. This involved a consistent mining of sources in an array of archives in Mexico and the United States. Thus, my methods differ from those undertaken by anthropologists, sociologists, and criminologists, who are active observers and ethnographers. Yet, I speak to their disciplines’ growing body of literature on women and drugs by explaining historical change over time and across spaces as essential to illicit flows whether in urban spaces, rural borderlands, or urban ports of entry.9 Through a historical approach, I explore the roles of women in all areas of the drug economy, from mules to bosses. I engage the historiography and policy studies on drug trafficking in North America by expanding its dimensions to consider the historical complexities of gender, race and ethnicity, and class as these intersect with drug trafficking in North America.

  U.S. Customs agents along the U.S.-Mexico border noted the growing prominence of women bootleggers and narcotics smugglers as early as 1914. By the early 1920s, those officials stationed in Mexicali-Calexico estimated that women may have been responsible for 60 percent of the drug flow across the border. As bootleggers, women became experts in peddling tequila and mescal; as mules, they hid narcotics under their skirts, in their clothing, or even in their bodies. One official complained: “It is not at all easy for men engaged in the work of trailing these agents to seize and search women.”10 The reason for their inability to seize and search women was due to a lack of female agents. U.S. Customs officials and smugglers along borders were engaged in a struggle, with women serving as the mules of choice because they were less likely to draw suspicion and be searched.

  By the early 1930s, with the end of Prohibition in the United States, the role of women in illicit trade in North America was made more explicit in the newspapers and was ever more disturbing for police, customs officials, Foreign Service officers, philanthropists, and narcotics warriors on both sides of the border. With the greater attention of law enforcement, smugglers grew more sophisticated and adept, demonstrating a fluidity to avoid capture and use new forms of technology whether in banking, communications, or transportation long befor
e the media and academic scholarship began to focus on the globalization of crime.11

  The professionalization of drug controls emerged in the early 1900s when countries led by the United States began to meet in an attempt to regulate the flows of opiates from Asia. With the formation of the League of Nations, the United States, although never a member of the league, found a venue in which to work closely with other countries to further attempt to stem the flows. In turn, narco-infused tales of deviancy, destruction, miscegenation, crime, and systemic dangers circulated and transgressed national borders. These narratives of vice crossed borders and intersected to construct and reinforce national tales of woeful criminality. These tropes have informed the popular imagination, forging shifts in political, medical, economic, cultural, and social practices. Moreover, drug economies coexisted with traditional economies but were more evident in marginal places of alleged violence such as inner cities and the border regions. These also exist in sites of profit, legitimate business, and political ambition, and they create socioeconomic advancement for those on either the margins or the apex of society, regardless of citizenship.12 Like the drugs themselves, narconarratives and narcoculture crossed socioeconomic boundaries of class, ethnicity, gender, and physical space. Just as today, drug money bought power, technology, and expertise as well as conspicuous consumption, which in turn structured identities and social hierarchies.13

  From the rise of drug trafficking in the early 1900s to its present manifestations, a century of narconarratives have flowed across borders. Scholar Hermann Herlinghaus argues that narconarratives designate a multiplicity of dramas expressed in antagonistic languages and articulated along the border through fantasies that revolve around the depravity and deterritorialization of individual and communitarian life.14 Many examples are evident, including the rise of narco-corridos, music that celebrates the exploits of drug traffickers. The U.S.-Mexico border has served as a common site for such analysis, but narconarratives expand beyond national borders because drug trafficking is a global enterprise tied to localized markets and forms of production; in Andean Cocaine, Paul Gootenberg explains how Peruvian officials, medical doctors, and industrialists saw cocaine as a commodity for medicinal purposes that could help modernize and industrialize the country. Even after cocaine became an illicit commodity, the Peruvian market for the drug continued to thrive.15 Moreover, these narratives, like all such creations, change over time to reflect shifts in laws, technology, and politically and criminologically infused popular interpretations. In the twentieth century, narconarratives crossed borders but also genres, whether political speeches, journalistic exposés, music, art, or film.

  In North America, border regions served as sites of illicit trade that offered women a place to conduct business, whether as suppliers, couriers, contacts, or clients.16 Certain women gained financially from the smuggling and peddling of narcotics, and they were often intimately involved in the planning and execution of the business. Women joined men in the establishment of chief narcotics ports along the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in the 1910s and 1920s. Moreover, these participants deployed new forms of technology, from concealment contraptions to airplanes, to supply customers in the major narcotics hubs of New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Toronto; cities far from Calexico-Mexicali, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico City, or from Buenos Aires and Medellín. They sought and struggled to consolidate their businesses and power.

  Scholars Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel warn against the belief that all nation-states are engaged in a valiant struggle against the transnational flows of crime and vice. Instead, these authors adopt a non-state-centric approach that makes a distinction between what nation-states deem to be legitimate (i.e., legal) and what different groups of people think is legitimate (i.e., licit).17 In keeping with this point of view, I utilize the state for its resources—since few traffickers have left their papers to an archive or library—while also highlighting how informal social networks developed throughout the twentieth century. I firmly reject the state’s framework regarding the drug trade that usually employs tropes of good versus evil. This story is far more complex.

  To uncover the stories of women’s, men’s, and their children’s involvement in the drug trade, I accessed a wide selection of materials including international diplomatic documents, medical and public welfare studies, letters, reports, correspondence between drug czars, newspapers, and prison and hospital records. Those women who flourished in the drug trade relied on their abilities to circumnavigate systems of constraint constructed by politicians and civil authorities. Public awareness of their existence and their participation brought financial difficulties and ruin to women peddlers and traffickers. Thus, I discuss in detail those who entered into the historical public record while acknowledging that countless others slipped through due in part to their ability to remain hidden. Beginning in the 1910s, these women established their own definitions of “legitimate” in their businesses that contradicted what national governments considered “legitimate.” Women in urban and rural settings saw the drug economy as a vehicle to making a viable living—like their other forms of informal work such as street vending or prostitution.18

  To find women involved in the drug trade decades ago involved tried and true historical methodology. Initially, I noticed that William Burroughs had mentioned Lola la Chata, a Mexico City drug boss, in his novels and short stories. In Mexico City, I read newspaper coverage of her while working on my dissertation on a completely different topic. Since then, in order to demonstrate the important role some women played in the drug trade, I have continued to seek women and build upon the methodologies of Luis Astorga, Nancy Campbell, Paul Gootenberg, Joe Spillane, and William Walker III to further analyze women’s illicit transnational businesses.19 I read newspapers from across the United States and Mexico looking for women involved in transnational drug enterprises. If the coverage was substantial enough, I pursued them in official documents and other public sources to develop a greater understanding of them and their eras, their lives, and their relationships with various forms of state and local power structures. Like these women, I, too, moved across borders in pursuit of sources in both the United States and Mexico. Many times, I pieced together their histories from evidence I found in various archives and libraries. At times, their stories abruptly ended due to death, imprisonment, or diminished stature in the trade, or they simply disappeared from the public record.

  These sources show that women, men, and children peddled and smuggled opiates, cocaine, and marijuana from and through Mexico, but also Colombia and Argentina, into the United States from 1900 to the 1980s. Upon examination, their lives complicate the accepted masculine constructions of the narcotics trade that predominate in journalistic coverage, policy studies, and popular culture. More importantly, these narratives have long been “open secrets”—a cultural dynamic where much is known but little is publicly acknowledged.20 Borrowing from the work of Avery Gordon, I agree that drugs have haunted the Americas, exhibiting seething presences, acting on and meddling with assumed realities not only on the border but throughout the hemisphere.21

  By analyzing peddling and trafficking, I thus construct a new understanding of the intersection between gender and the transnational concepts of crime, nation, political economy, modernity, and globalization from the early 1900s. More importantly, I demonstrate how women and men, whether traffickers, peddlers, or policing agents, concocted and contextualized the role of women in the trade in response to diverse shifts throughout time. Historian Nancy Campbell has suggested that drugs became codified as a threat particularly to white women, who held an ambiguous status in the United States due to their lack of political and financial independence during the early years of efforts to stem the flow of narcotics trafficking. Significantly, Campbell argues that drugs “threatened civilization by working to level the naturalized hierarchy of the distinction between the sexes and the state.”22 Women addicts neglected their duties
as mothers and wives to acculturate children and maintain a stable home. Instead, they pursued their addiction. As peddlers, dealers, and traffickers, they further threatened civilization by challenging the view that women were “unfit” to hold positions in the upper hierarchies of the drug economy, just as they were considered “unfit” to play a role in the upper levels of the formal economy. Drug trafficking has traditionally been perceived as a man’s world by both male and female scholars and policy makers.23

  As drug use shifted from elite, white, female iatrogenic (doctor-assisted) addicts in the late nineteenth century to urban, lower-class, male criminal addicts, certain women exploited lucrative career paths.24 They accessed one of the few spaces in the economy left open to them: the informal market. Women have frequently used this market to build capital and, at times, personal and economic influence in their communities. Building upon the illicit trade routes created by bootleggers along the U.S.-Mexico border during the early 1900s, women found that narcotics smuggling paid more than peddling food, drinks, or their own bodies. Accustomed to working in the informal economy or the secondary labor market, they used a prescribed gender role—their feminine wiles—to advance their positions in this business. Women in Mexico, along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in other parts of the world were able to develop sophisticated networks of trafficking.