The Cartel Heroin Queenpin Who Ran Juarez for 50 Years with Benjamin Smith
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No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld. June 1955. An El Paso journalist, Ruben Salazar, is feeling nervous.

He's standing outside a big yellow house in one of Ciudad Juarez's roughest neighborhoods. Fancy ironwork covers the windows and bright purple flowers hang over from the high walls. Around him, neighbors peep out the doors of their ramshackle wooden huts and stare at the newcomer. Dust swirls off the dirt streets. Wandering dogs look hungry, but it's who's inside that has Ruben sweating. Together with an El Paso addict, who Ruben dubs hypo because of his frequent use of hypodermic needles,

Ruben has a meeting with Ciudad Juarez's biggest heroin dealer. He's heard about her from childhood. She's a killer, a drug peddler, one half of a border Bonnie and Clyde, and the scourge of U.S. drug agents. She is the city's dope queen, a queen pet. She's a fable, a folk hero, and a boogie woman used to scare small kids.

It's a rep that allows her to rule the drug game in the city for over four decades. She is Ignacia Hasso de Gonzalez, also known as La Nacha. In the end, Ruben is okay. Hypo knocks on the door and waves a $5 note. La Nacha opens the door and lets them in. At first, Ruben is underwhelmed. Broad-shouldered, overweight, dark-skinned, and with the faint pockmarks of a childhood chicken pox, La Nacha looks like a thousand middle-aged women who made Ciudad Juarez their home.

Dressed in a black skirt and dark apron, she could have been Ruben's grandmother. The house itself is warm and welcoming. Surrounded by prefab shacks, it's a model of middle-class aspiration. The courtyard is bright and pretty, flanked by pot plants and climbing vines, and the living room is jammed with floral U.S.-made furniture, and beans are cooking on the new gas stove as a TV blares. Lanacha motions Ruben and Hypo to the bedroom. Here, flanked by her daughter, she lays out dozens of strips of white paper.

They are neatly arranged in a row, and each contains a $5 shot of brownish heroin. It was what local addicts called a dirty load, a mix of brown homegrown heroin and stronger medical-grade imported stuff. Linacha is suspicious. She knows Hypo, but not Ruben. She sees his relatively healthy pallor and his unmarked arms. Hypo kind of gets the hint, and he explains that Ruben isn't a mainliner yet. He doesn't inject, he just likes to sniff the drug.

All right, he can come anytime, says La Nacha, persuaded. At night, we sell across the street, adds her daughter. It's a 24-hour service. The deal is done. Hypo and Ruben leave the house and split. Hypo goes to a local flophouse and injects the junk. He knows he's screwed. He tells Ruben, quote, I've got to quit this habit for my little daughter's sake. I love her very much. God, I wish I could stop her.

Rubin goes back to El Paso and writes up the story. Two days later, La Nacha sells dirty dope at $5 a paper and is splashed over the front page of the El Paso Times. And four months later, Rubin stands before a Senate committee recounting his encounter with what Americans now call the border dope queen, to a mass of startled politicians and reporters.

How does a woman run Mexico's biggest drug racket, asked one of the politicians. Menacha has dominated the Ciudad Juarez trade for 20 years. She goes on to do so for another 20 years. This is the Underworld Podcast.

Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast. I am your host, as always, Danny Gold. My partner, Sean Williams, is out doing, I don't even know, Belize, Somalia, who knows where that guy is. But this is the podcast where every week we take you through various stories of international organized crime. Usually, we are two journalists who have worked all over the world doing this. But today, I am here with the great Benjamin Smith, who

who's a historian and a Brit. And he just published this amazing book on the history of the Mexican drug business. I'm talking, it goes all the way back to

It's called The Dope, The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. You can find it anywhere, Amazon, all that. You should definitely get a copy. It's published by Penguin in the UK and Nord in the US. And it's actually coming out in paperback this summer. And Benjamin, he wrote the opening story that you just heard. He's been kind enough to write up this episode. And here at The Underworld, we love people who do all the work for us. And Benjamin is one of those guys. So Benjamin, thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, that's really kind, man. It's a bit of an honour to be on the show. I've been down in Mexico for the last month and trying to kind of keep myself fit, running up the mountains and been listening to the podcast the whole time. So I'm loving the stories and also the kind of crazy geographical reach. So you go from like Burma to Philly, Belize to Afghanistan. I've never really heard anything like it. So, well, thanks for doing the podcast, really.

Yeah, and thanks for being a part of it. I think there's a couple stories when I was reading your book that stuck out to me as stuff that we should definitely do episodes on that I hadn't heard before at all, which I think is rare in covering the drug war and the history of drugs in Mexico and the game and all that. And you definitely found those stories, and I think La Nacha is a great one. So thank you for bringing that to the episode. And also, I'm kind of interested, too, just a little bit of background. You're a Brit.

uh, you're kind of far from home. There's so many Brits. I know that, that do the drug trade, not just in Mexico, but all over. We've obviously had, uh, Toby muse on the podcast before who's been in Columbia forever. And Yoan Grillo, uh, Duncan Tucker, the late great Joe Tuckman, uh,

a bunch of others. What, like, why are there so many Brits that are into this subject? It's, it's a really good question. One, I kind of asked myself, I'm pretty close to, to, to Yoan. And, and, uh, I think Toby and I share a publisher. So, uh,

kind of got into contact. So I think it's kind of a question, a bit like the drug trade of kind of timing and money. So loads of British journalists, a bit like me, came to Mexico in the late 90s and early 2000s. Most of us came to the country basically because of positive stories, right? We were obsessed by democratization and pretty cool art and great drink and social movements and indigenous guerrilla groups like the Zapatistas.

So the better journalists like Yowen or like Joe Tuckman or like Nina Lakhani, they stayed. I managed to get sacked within about two weeks of getting to Mexico. Nice. And yeah, those who can do, those who don't go and study a PhD. So I returned to the UK, kind of still obsessed by Mexico and started to work basically on, well,

basically on the history of indigenous movements. Then I moved on to the history of the drug trade. Um, I think the second reason loads of Brits and also a lot of Europeans have been doing this kind of work in the last decade is that frankly,

we're the only people who've managed to get the financial backing and the permission from our universities to do it. So to write this book, I got a grant from the UK government to research and write it. American universities frankly don't allow their academics to go to some of these more dangerous parts of Mexico and they don't, certainly don't pay them to do it. So,

So loads of English language reported on Mexico's drug war is really kind of left up to us Brits, which is why I think Johan has such an important place, and Toby actually, in reporting what's going on in Latin America. Well, yeah, I mean, you guys do great work, especially for a place that's not in your backyard like it is ours.

And I think one of the things I really liked about your book, which you don't see, I think, in a lot of drug war books is, you know, they get into make maybe a little bit of the history, especially with the Mexico cartel stuff. It starts in the 80s and 90s. Would you go back 100 years, you know, and you kind of explain how step by step the drug trade in Mexico just became so.

violent over the last 20 years. But you also look back on kind of the roots of it all, right? You give us a story of like the early marijuana smokers during the revolution, the first peasants that tried to go opium and produce heroin for the American market. Um,

It was interesting to see that they all came from Chapo's village and just the massive levels of corruption on both sides of the border. But obviously, Chapo, that story has been told a lot. We're here to talk about an old school drug trafficker, one of Mexico's first, certainly the first to become America's public enemy number one. And it's not some Mexican tough guy or some ex-cop, it's this middle-aged woman who

who looks like someone's grandmother called La Nacha, which is, I mean, how has there not been a movie made about her yet? Right. So I guess, you know, my first question is, you know, how common is this? How much do women play? Like how much of a role do they play in the Mexican drug trade? And can we give them, how much can we give them credit for?

Yeah, I've been talking about a movie. I'm just thinking that Salma Hayek has to kind of age into the role. You know, that's a hope on my part. Anyway, so, yeah, how much do women play a role in the drug trade both then and now? In reality, I think that women play and still play really key roles in the drug trade and the Mexican drug trade. So men own the poppy fields, but it's women and children who still do the work. They harvest the gum.

their hands are kind of small and steady enough to wield the blade and make the incisions and get at the opium gum itself. Women were, at least until recently, some of Mexico's biggest drug chemists as well, which was something that really surprised me. Oh, wow. They included this. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy stuff. So they include actually one woman. I'm not sure her family's been terribly impressed by me mentioning her name, but her name is Veneranda Batista. She's like some...

big Sinaloa aristocrat who was the first woman to attend the Sinaloa University, so from a super posh background. She studies chemistry and then teams up with the kind of tough mountain men who grow the opium and manufacture Mexico's first heroin in one of her pharmacies. I mean, even Rafael Caro Quintero that some of your listeners would have watched on the screen, portrayed in Narcos, one of the

members of the guadalajara cartel the kiki the killer of kiki camarena he got his first break not working with his the male members of his family but with his aunt who was a big-time heroin chemist uh from sinaloa called manuela carol um now nowadays women are less involved in the kind of chemistry aspect but they do take the role of laundering cartel funds

So there's a very famous one recently called Sandra Villabeltran or the Queen of the Pacific, who used kind of currency exchanges to wash the Sinaloa cartels money. Or even now, actually, Chapo's wife, who's in court facing U.S. money laundering charges. Having said all this, having said women are much more involved than we kind of give them credit for.

Now, Natcha is clearly a really remarkable figure. She dominates the Juarez trade from 1930 to 1970. And she's not just one link in the chain, a money launderer or chemist. She's the main drug seller, the main drug trafficker in the city, in the biggest kind of transport point for drugs over the kind of Mexican-U.S. border. She's basically, as I say, the queenpin.

So, La Nacha rules Ciudad Juarez. And I'm sure some of our listeners probably have heard of the city before. There have been depressing news stories out of there for decades.

It's the center. It was the center of the drug wars for many years. It had this murder rate that was higher than Baghdad and saw these crazy open street battles between the cartels. But as, as you point out, Sue Dad Juarez, it has this really long history of being linked to the drug. It's got a pretty long history of being linked to pretty much every American vice. Um, and it's something that I really didn't know until I was researching this book. Um,

So during the 1910s, what are now kind of posh retirement Sunbelt cities with high real estate values like El Paso and San Diego were basically vice dens. And they provided for farm workers and soldiers who were stationed on the Mexican-American border. And they offered sex workers and gambling and booze and, of course, drugs. But in the late 1910s, the U.S. government basically started cracking down on more fun.

and they banned horse racing and gambling and sex work and drugs. And this comes to a head with something called the Volstead Act, which I'm sure many of the listeners know, basically introduces prohibition in 1919. Now, on the border...

This has a kind of strange effect. All it really does is push the vice out of El Paso and San Diego and about five miles south to Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. And what had been tiny, dusty farm villages in 1910, by the 1920s, these massive vice centers stuffed full of famous brothels and bars and drug joints. And if you're American and you want to get high in 1920, you don't go to Las Vegas, you go to Ciudad Juarez.

And here the authorities concentrate all the vice work in this big, long street that's totally famous throughout the city called Calle Mariscal. But the locals call it the Street of the Devil. And the streets kind of lined with these huge bars like the Cafe Popular, where the where the American owner claims she employs 400 women and patrons drink a hundred bottles of champagne a night.

So yeah, Juarez is the vice center for America in that period. And this is what La Natcha gets to rule. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a good time, you know? And yeah,

It's here in this big border Las Vegas of Ciudad Juarez that Lanacha gets her break into the drug business. And there was clearly a massive market for marijuana, for cocaine, for heroin. But can you talk a bit about how particularly she got involved? Yeah, so Lanacha's not from Ciudad Juarez. Actually, very few people are from Ciudad Juarez because it's just a huge expanding city. She comes from this tiny mountain village called, I think, Mapimi, which is about 500 miles of desert to the south.

She's born there in about 1900, but during the 1910s, Mexico has this big revolution, and a lot of these mountain towns are very unsafe and also economically not viable. So La Nacha and the rest of her family

Like loads of Mexicans look for refuge and presumably work in growing cities on the border like Ciudad Juarez. So she turns up here sometime in the late 1910s and she marries, but she marries, she marries this kind of wild revolutionary gunman called Pablo Gonzalez. In Juarez, everyone knows him as Pablote, El Pablote. And he's a legend. And it's basically El Pablote who gives La Nacha a start in the business.

I mean, El Pablote is involved not only in drugs, but also every crime imaginable. Armed robbery, kidnapping, fencing stolen jewelry, robbing American tourists. But he and Lanaccia find out that those are quite dangerous crimes that you might get caught for, and Lanaccia found the best way to make money

off the tourists is drugs. And around 1925, they start to work for the city's biggest drug trafficker, a guy called Enrique Fernandez. And El Pablote in particular gets quite a lot of fame as Fernandez's toughest of the tough, his principal gunman and principal trafficker. So yeah, she starts off. It's really her husband who gives her the big break in the industry.

So those of you who are, who want to make the movie right now, the book is called the dope Benjamin Smith. Look it up by the rights. Cause I I'm ready to watch this, right? I'll watch three seasons right now, or, you know, 95 minutes, whatever, whatever it's best served. So L,

So El Pablote and La Nacha, they're this, as you said, a kind of border Bonnie and Clyde in Mexico. They're making money moving drugs from Mexico City up to the border. And this was an interesting piece in your book. Most of the drugs weren't grown in Mexico at this point, right? They're imported from factories in Europe that still made morphine and heroin, I assume probably from growing in Turkey or Afghanistan, one of those places. And I suppose this might actually surprise some people. And anyway-

Pablotti and Lanaccia, they're working for this big Ciudad Juarez kingpin, Enrique Fernandez. But El Pablotti isn't in the picture very well. No, and I suppose this is kind of the surprising thing about Lanaccia's story. She clearly doesn't actually need a man. I mean, El Pablotti is frankly a thug. He's always in trouble pretty much every year, shooting up bars, getting into squabbles with the police and the military. And in 1930, he gets into a squabble with the wrong policeman.

He wanders into this massive bar brothel, the Café Popular, that's selling 100 bottles of champagne a night, and gets into a fight with an off-duty cop. Shots are exchanged. He ends up dead, shot in the chest. And at the age of 30, La Nacha is basically an impoverished widow with four kids and no gun-toting psycho to protect her. And I think the kind of extraordinary is how she survives and flourishes without El Pablote.

She's an independent woman. But yeah, El Pavote. That she is. Yeah, he might be dead, but he does stay kind of like this bit of a legend. He's got that outlaw mystique in Cio Dauarez. In fact, you mentioned in the book that La Nacha commissions a song in his honor. It is, you claim this, the first narco-corrito, the first song devoted to heroizing, heroizing? How do you say that word? Whatever. Turning drug traffickers into heroes. And you've even brought in a version, I think, that we can hear a bit of. Yes, certainly.

La bala 45, el pecho le atravesó.

You can really imagine this mariachi band playing this in the bar just a few days after his death, and his mates just drunkenly singing along. So, the bit we heard, what does it say? It's a kind of strange song, though it's pretty clear that the Natcha commissioned the song. The composer is clearly not a big fan of El Pablote, and he says here that just ten months earlier El Pablote had killed another policeman, and this time, when he was shot by another policeman, he

he was getting his just desserts, which I suppose is well, pretty ballsy giving his wife has paid you to write the song. Uh, but I also think it shows you that many people think that without Pablo backing her, learn that she's finished, right? She's Bonnie without Clyde. She, she basically has no backup now. Um, uh,

And I think it's shown in the lyrics of the song. But as we covered, this is not the case. And as you made clear, her drug business actually went from strength to strength. It just keeps growing. And she does better without El Pablote than she did with him. Yeah. So the next few years after El Pablote's death are absolutely crucial to Lanach's business. And I show, I think...

the kind of two most important elements of her strategy. One, her kind of imagination, I suppose her entrepreneurialism, and also her ability to make deals with Ciudad Juarez's

politicians. So when El Pablote dies in 1930, La Nacha is not only a widow, she's also facing her own charges of drug peddling. And she does a bit of time in the city jail and she comes to a pretty clear realisation. Drug sales to street addicts are really problematic because street addicts are unreliable. They drift from place to place and

They've got limited brand loyalty. They can buy from anyone and they just get drugs where they're cheapest. In Juarez, then the Americans are kind of the worst street addicts. They get caught and they snitch on you to the cops and then run away to the United States before you can stop.

Now, that's why she's in jail. An American addict had actually snitched on her. So she basically changes tactic completely. Instead of selling, she realizes that the best place to sell drugs isn't on the street, the street addicts, but to Ciudad Juarez's prison population. It's literally a kind of captive market, and it's a growing one. Weeks rarely pass without a barroom brawl or a mass roundup of drunks and drug addicts. So as soon as she gets

gets out she makes contact with the two women who sold food inside the jail and she pays them to hide marijuana and morphine and heroin in their piles of tacos and sweets and fruit and they then bring them into the jail and sell them to the prisoners beyond the raw drugs they also sell and this kind of amazed me uh it seems as such a complete deal she sells them

Needles, foil paper, eyedroppers to add water to the heated heroin, and even short knives to slide the heroin onto foil paper. It's kind of an all-in-one service. So that's what La Nacha is offering. So within a year, La Nacha then has firmed up this new market, and it's much more secure than her last one. But she's still got one problem. She has a rival for domination for the Ciudad Juarez trade, and that's her old boss, or El Pablote's boss,

the king of morphine, Enrique Fernandez, this kind of Ciudad Juarez kingpin. He had actually gone upscale by that time, moved into managing the city's two biggest casinos, brought up shops and bars and even a silver mine. But he's still involved in the drug business.

And this, I suppose, where a political acumen comes in. And I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but basically Fernandez and Lanacha are the biggest drug dealers in Juarez, but it's the politicians who really run the trade, not dissimilar to now. They decide who gets sold and who gets caught, sorry, who gets, who sells and who gets caught out. And they demand protection money to make sure you don't go to jail.

And in 1932, this new group of politicians come to power in Juarez. They're called the Quevedos. There's a guy called Rodrigo Quevedo, who's elected governor of the state of Chihuahua. His brother Jesus is elected mayor of Ciudad Juarez. And Jose is made the Juarez tax collector, or basically the man who collects the protection money from the drug dealers.

Now, in 1933, they fall out with Fernandez, either because he doesn't pay them enough or because they see him as a rival. Anyway, they send a hit squad of policemen against him. They close his casinos. They burn down his bar. And they start to also whack his drug sellers. And they dump the bodies in this famous unmarked graveyard outside the city called La Piedrada, the stony place. His drug traffickers were not only shot,

They'd also had their fingers and toes removed. It was actually this 1933 massacre is, to my knowledge, the first real drug massacre. And it's not ordered by cartels. It's ordered by the government. Anyway, finally, in 1934, the government come for Fernandez. They shot him, but he manages to escape on a train down to Mexico City disguised as a woman. But they trail him there, stalk him out and eventually shoot him dead.

And without Fernandez, the Quevedo brothers in charge of the whole area of Ciudad Juarez, they look for a new leader to run the city's drug business and they settle on La Nacha. So in 1934, four years after the death of her husband and her imprisonment, she's gone from being a poverty-stricken, defenceless widow to become the biggest head of the border city's drug market. So it's a pretty extraordinary kind of story of...

return, revenge, the story of success, really.

Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing story. And if anyone's interested, you actually have a whole chapter in the book about Fernandez, his drug business, his obsession with building schools, and the crazy chase that ends in his demise. But anyway, we want to talk about his successor, La Nacha. You mentioned that she had a way with politicians and that to be a successful drug dealer in Mexico, you probably need a way with politicians. And you kind of talk about this in the book as well, the way you describe it as like, I think, rackets, right? As opposed to

I'm blanking on it because I read it probably like six months ago, but you really get into this idea of rackets and all that. Can you talk a bit more about how she was able to do this?

Yeah, so La Nacha isn't a kind of a natural, I don't know, politician. She's not a natural charmer or a beauty or somebody who has established contact. She doesn't come from a posh family. She comes from a tiny little rural village. She always lives to her dying day in the poorest area of Juarez. And she also apparently listers her conversations with expletives, right? She's not the kind of person you invite to the political dinner party. Right.

But she's really clever at dealing with politicians. And her principal answer to this is pay them. And over the next 40 years, she moves to whoever's in power and offers them a substantial slice of her profits. She doesn't really care who, right? It could be the local mayor or the local police chief or the governor of Chihuahua. In the 1950s, we know she was paying, for example, the governor between $5,000 and $7,000 a week.

to go about her business so she knows who to pay off. So a lot of drug dealers, no doubt, do this kind of thing. But where Nalannacha goes beyond most...

is her knowledge actually of the law. Now, whether she learns this in the 1920s when El Pablotti and her are in and out of prison, or whether she had a kind of helpful lawyer, I just don't know where she picks this up. But La Nacha was an absolute master of manipulating Mexico's legal system. And in particular, and again, I don't want to go too much into the weeds, but she's a master of something that's in Spanish called the amparo.

It's a really weird, distinctive Mexican brand of judicial witchcraft. It's basically it's a program that was originally established to defend citizens from imprisonment based on torture or harassment or falsifying evidence. But by the 1930s, it's become the method for criminals to escape prosecution.

Now, it takes money and it takes contacts to get an amparo. But if you've got the right lawyer and you can bribe the right judge and offer the right amount of money and make the right accusations, you can get an amparo and you can basically get out of jail. And La Nacho is just amazing at getting these. Every time she's put in jail, and she's put in there fairly frequently, she manages to get an amparo.

and get out within just a few months. So she gets one, and I think I counted one in 1938, 1942, 1947, and 1953. Her daughter gets one as well. Both her sons get one in 1956 when they're hauled in for money laundering. In fact, her manipulation of the legal system is so complete that by the 1950s, she's acquired some kind of super amparo. It basically states that the authorities are harassing her

So arresting her for drug offenses is essentially breaking the law. So it's kind of a very literal get out of jail free card. And she carries it around wherever she goes. And the Americans are furious about this. They can't put her in jail. It was a physical card, actually? Yeah, it's a letter she carries around with her. Yeah, it's amazing. And I imagine a lot of drug traffickers right now wish that these kind of laws still existed.

Yeah, yeah. I suspect they, well, I mean, they kind of still do. The amparo's still in the legal system. And I mean, over the last decade or so, about 150 kingpins have been captured in Mexico and about 100 of them have already been released from prison. Many of them, I suspect, using these amparos. So, yeah, these things still exist.

But yeah, so La Nacha, she's a political player. She knows who to bribe, how much to bribe them. She's also a businesswoman, as you said, like an entrepreneur. So, you know, what were some of the innovations that she brought to the Ciudad Juarez drug trade? I imagine this is part of the reason she survived and flourished for so long. Yeah, I think so. I mean, she's really, really astute as a businesswoman, and she's clearly not proud, right, as shown by the fact that she still lives in this kind of fairly rough area of Juarez.

She's happy to move from trafficking drugs over the border to selling drugs on the street to wholesaling the stuff back to trafficking, basically depending where the opportunities were. She never wants to sit in some grand palatial estate far from the action. She always meets the addicts, as she does with the journalist Ruben Salazar. She finds out what they want and she meets their needs. One of her key innovations, for example, is basically Sudar Juarez's first shooting galleries.

or what locals have their own name for. They call them picaderos. So in the 1940s, loads of soldiers from Fort Bliss are going to Juarez for the weekend, visiting the bars and brothels and getting high. The American authorities are getting really worried. Thousands of soldiers are catching syphilis and loads are overdosing or getting involved in bar fights. So they put pressure on the ciudad Juarez to close down the red light district.

uh, closed down this big street called Calle Mariscal, the street of the devil. Um, now,

in a basically a single move this crushes la natures market but lanache is not phased within a year she pays various friends mostly widows and single mothers like her to rent out the front part of their houses as effective shooting galleries soldiers arrive they pay for a shot of morphine or heroin and they pay a little extra if they want to get injected um and they rest there until they can move again

Now, these picaderos were off the main drag, so they're much less easy for the police to locate. They're spread all over the city and they move every month or so. So the authorities can't track them. So it's kind of business, kind of brilliant business decision. She created a kind of eBay drug market where loads of Juarez citizens were getting a cut of drug money. But she was keeping the most.

Yeah, I mean, it's brilliant. And you kind of see these innovations, I feel like, every few years in the drug realm of how to change things and how to stay out of trouble. And that's kind of what I want to round back to a bit, because you mentioned in the beginning that she was this American public enemy. She wasn't just a Ciudad Juarez or a Mexican phenomenon. She was hated by the Americans, by big-name politicians, police, all that. And her drugs were feeding mostly El Paso and Texo addicts.

including soldiers. So how did she escape the American wrath? Yeah, this is a really good question. I mean, again, in a way, this shows her genius or at least a kind of brilliant cynicism. So in 1942, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which is basically the principal

precursor of the DEA, a man called Harry Anslinger. He needs a new enemy in the war on drugs. Because of the World War II, he can't really blame the Chinese or the Japanese like he used to, so he decides to blame the Mexicans. And what better target than a border dope queen, La Natcha? So the first thing he does is he sends a couple of

drug agents down there and they completely illegally as far as I can make out claim they're working for the American government and they want to buy legal morphine to treat injured soldiers but the natural smart she doesn't buy this she arranged a deal with them but then backs out at the last moment and sends a couple of her workers over the border with the drugs and she refuses to go herself so Ansling is kind of thwarted and

And he gets even more angry, and this time he puts enough pressure on the Mexican authorities to act, and they raid La Nacha's house, they plant a few drugs, they lock her up. This is 1942. Anslinger then demands the president of Mexico either extradite her to the US, or at the very least send her to this feared Mexican prison island called Las Islas Marias.

But again, here, La Natcha's kind of a genius. She does something really, really smart. She not only understood Mexicans, clearly, she understood Americans. And she understood one of the American weaknesses, or at least one of their blind spots, is evangelical Christianity. So she goes to jail.

Uh, and she gets a few, a group of a few evangelicals from Juarez to testify on her behalf. And they declare she's now, and I quote from them, a religious woman who tries to all means possible to do good to the persons that need her. Yes. Some time ago, she lived a sinful life, but now her customs and feelings have changed completely. Um,

She even completes this look. She invites journalists into the prison and they see her reformed lifestyle and she gives them a quote. She says, I accepted Christ after I heard the Bible message. I've also found through reading the scripture a consolation and a peace of mind hard to describe.

So basically, she becomes the kind of matron for the female wing of the jail. She arranges for an evangelical preacher to come in and preach to the place every Friday. Now, not only is this scheme quite funny, it kind of works. She got evangelical churches on both sides of the border.

to basically make her a prisoner of conscience and demand her release. And the American authorities actually take note. Demands for the extradition completely disappear. She gets to stay in the local Juarez jail rather than to be sent to the prison island. And when she gets out the door in 1945, she goes straight back into the drug business. So this looks like just a kind of clever strategy to play on American...

evangelical Christianity. Super smart. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the stories that we've done on the evangelical churches in El Salvador, the gangs there, MS-13 and 18th Street, where it's kind of like the only way out. It's all, you know, I guess history is a flat circle and all that. It is. You mentioned La Nacha runs her drug business for 40 years, which is an insane amount for someone to be on top. What eventually brings her reign to an end?

So, yeah, during the 1970s, the federal cops in Mexico attempt to kind of take over control of the market. And they certainly kill members of La Nacha's family, including her grandson is a guy called El Arabe, who the federal cops kill and basically give his business to one of their chosen drug traffickers. But La Nacha survives even this.

And it's only really her death that knocks her out of the business. And she dies at the grand old age of 82 in 1982. She still lives in exactly the same middle class house in this rough part of Juarez. Her children and the grandchildren who survive have all set up their own businesses by then. And she dies peacefully, like like kind of every drug trafficker dreams. She goes out in her sleep.

Yeah, I mean, we need the movie or we need four seasons or something along those. I mean, also just these old school characters, man. And your book, again, that's The Dope by Benjamin Smith. It's chock full of these stories, just these border outlaws when it's kind of, you know, obviously it's drug trafficking. It's not a nice business, but it's not. And people get killed, but it's not like now, right, where there's this insane level of brutality. There's almost a sort of romanticism there with these border outlaws, right?

in these lawless areas in, like, the 30s and 40s, you know? It's, um... I don't know. I think it needs a TV series, for sure. I think, I mean, I think... I mean, I think you're right. It is... I think what struck me, really, was quite how pacific the drug industry is. Pre... I mean, pre the 1970s, it's almost completely pacific. I mean, it's all organized through these kind of family networks, right? And people basically trust their family network, maybe some of their god...

you know, godparents and maybe some people they marry into. But it's these kind of small little networks that don't kill each other. It's only really when the government gets involved in the 70s and then much worse in the 1990s that they become violent, mostly because they're fighting for their lives.

Yeah, so I mean, all these stories, all this trajectory is in Benjamin's book. Definitely go pick it up. And Benjamin, I just want to thank you again for coming on the show. We really, really appreciate it. We also have a bunch of other interviews with journalists that do this kind of stuff on the Patreon. Patreon.com slash The End of World Podcast for $5 a month. Get a whole slew of new content and interviews with journalists like Benjamin. But yeah, man, the book is excellent. And thanks again for basically writing this entire episode and coming on,

coming on the show. No, man, it was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot and keep doing the good work. Awesome. So until next week, thanks again, everyone, for tuning in. I'm sending my Aunt Tina money directly to her bank account in the Philippines with Western Union. She's the self-proclaimed bingo queen of Manila, and I know better to interrupt her on bingo night, even to pick up cash. Sending money direct to her bank account is super fast, and Aunt Tina gets more time to...

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