The Secret Rise of Female Narcos in Latin American Cartels with Deborah Bonello
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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.

Debra 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, Narcas, 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, Debra. And it's good timing that we're doing this show right now on the news cycle. Emma Coronel has just been released. Or has it 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 Sinaloa 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 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 Botrona 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's

She's 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 Sinaloa cartel. And I dug into who the highest ranking woman in the Sinaloa cartel was, and her name is practically unknown. And it just seemed to me that 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 organized crime and therefore was sort of kept out of the limelight and kept out of the understanding of how women moved in organized 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 Kata 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 Morticia Adams, which is a nice touch. Yeah.

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 place. But yes. Yeah, in theory, that was the comparison I made when I was writing the book two years ago. But the Kardashians are sort of changed. But yes, it was accurate at the time.

And so, yeah, she's somebody who is prominent through her marriage to a man who is prominent in the organization essentially. But as you say, the premise of your book is that the sort of the concept or the

the idea of women in organized criminal groups is either as a sort of victim or somebody who's sexualized and is sort of an accoutrement to the gang itself. How quickly did that kind of binary change?

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 Digna Valle, who worked for the Valle cartel in Honduras. Both 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 women.

in that sort of Charlie's angel way that we've come to, to, 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, um,

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, um,

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 journalist 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? Right.

Sure. I mean, I'd ask you anecdotally, you know, in 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 framed 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 is being elevated, the amount of voices that are being heard, how our concept of gender changes.

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 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 spoken about, and then the history of

Narco-trafficking in Latin America is also not a male, exclusively male thing at all. Now, you mentioned a few different people in the kind of long-running history of Latin American crime. One of them is Maria Dolores Estevez Zuleta, 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 contacts 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, you know, 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 yeah,

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 and 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 20th century, so 1920s, 1930s, 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 defense 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 and controlled by women. You know, street markets is one of them, but, you know, beauty salons, clothes shops, hat 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 are

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,

And yeah, she was also, I think, there's a lot of misunderstanding between women and their relationship with violence too. And I think Sarmiento 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, you know, effective threats are absolutely essential when it comes to illegal businesses. And I think when women realized 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

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 Coronel how to shoot a gun because after, 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 2019, 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 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 policy.

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 Dina Valley as well. She's 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

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 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 there with a contraband specialist. They would smuggle tobacco and alcohol and then cattle. And then, you know, in the 70s and 80s, when cocaine started flowing around,

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. Yeah. Um,

But you see this all over the region where families like theirs sort of are both respected and feared benefactors. So when I went to the little town where she and her family were in control, you know, they had been responsible for everything.

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 cars. Yeah.

You know, 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. There was a moment where you mentioned that one of the coppers says,

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He says, 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 valets and speak to them and I'll have a brand new car in like 24 hours or something. 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 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 moneylenders, they become sort of powerhouses. You know, I remember when I was driving out there with the bishop, it 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 to said that that was the mansion that Dignan 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 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...

it was hard to kind of parse 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 offenses. 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 loyalty 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 Valles, 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 decided

And the U.S. government stated that it thought at least 80 percent 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 U.S. had to work with the rather questionable abilities of Honduran law enforcement, as well as Honduras.

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 pressure and the DEA was trying to, you know, put together indictments and what have you and charges against individuals in the Valle cartel, loyalty and control became even more important to the Valles. 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 person was an asylum seeker in the US who came from Dignas territory and she had been working as a DEA informant. And when Dignas found out about that, she apparently sent around 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 organization. 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 who 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 Digni knew what was going on and 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, um,

and their families are told not to report it, otherwise there would be consequences. For people like Digno, she was benefiting directly 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, is a, is a, you know, a new and booming industry. And so, you know, a lot of the time Digno wasn't, you know, she wasn't having to,

do those murders 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 the literal sense by delegating that violence out. And give us a flavour of what it's like down there now. I mean, you mention all of this obvious violence

products 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 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 president at the time, Juan Orlando Hernández, has since been indicted and extradited to the U.S. to face cocaine charges. And his brother has been convicted for life in the U.S. for cocaine trafficking. So...

So, you know, the fact that she was in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.,

under the Convention Against Torture. So she was sitting in, 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 to her, 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 Dignar 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, she was kind of

She seems strangely almost avuncular and friendly when you speak to her briefly. Yeah, she was muted. She seemed sort of tired. She's now in her early to mid-60s and she'd been in detention for the best part of a decade and then she was fighting this...

this deportation initiative. But 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 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 tin pot town in the middle of nowhere. 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

And, you know, at the time, El Espirito looked like the typical Pueblito in Latin America. You know, I would say it was home to 3,000 or 4,000 people, huge Catholic church, a lot of unpaved streets, tiny shops selling Coca-Cola and chetos and tortillas everywhere, you know, lots of stray dogs. And, you know, the usual. It looked very un-extraordinary, apart from, you know, these oversized houses that punctuated the town.

So I have since been told that Digno has gone home. I suppose after she saw the then president extradited to the U.S.,

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 her 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, El Espiritu, anytime 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 that...

the Vaya cartel, you know, other members of the cartel who didn't get long sentences 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, putting in key leaders, you

We just saw Ovidio Guzman extradited over the weekend, one of Chapo's sons from Mexico. And, you know, we're about to start that circus trial, you know. But what doesn't happen is the organizations aren't dismantled. So the organizations aren't dismantled and the cocaine business goes.

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 and never ending. You know, we saw this too, you know, with the FARC in Colombia. It's probably the clearest example of how, you know, the Peace Corps 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 up. 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

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...

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 Mara Salvatrucha 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 organization that's right brenda was a member i think she was a jumped in member of the barrio jesse ocho gang in uh houston if i if i remember rightly it's important just to backtrack a little bit you know the matter became very prominent uh 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 disenfranchised youth from countries where 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 that 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 in the early days, women were very 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 fashion and what have you. And Brenda Pass was a young homie who I believe was based in Houston. And she was a member of the Barrio Gessiocho. And

For reasons that are probably not worth going into, she was actually working as a DEA informant in a 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 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 if you're cooperating with police, right? But who knows? I mean, there's some stuff there that

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...

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 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. They're business institutions.

they're 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 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? Cause that's, that's not a nice thing either. So if you want to become an, an official member of the gang, you have to go through an initiation process. And for men, um,

That's usually having your fellow gang members be on you for a number of minutes. And for women, 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?

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. For me, certainly in El Salvador, there's a very different socioeconomic reality for the gangs there than the Raft of the Cartels. Like, a lot of the foot soldiers of the Mara Salvatrucha, you know, the MS-13 and the Barrios de Asiocho are, you know, they're very...

like, you know, what's the word? It's just like the very lowest echelons 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 cartel lifestyle. You see what I mean? 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 prison.

in Latin America. Do you know what I mean? That's kind of a different organisation. And whereas we have seen the gangs sort of shepherd loads of

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 Guatemala. They are not an internet, a transnational criminal organization in the way that the cartels are like, they're very kind of limited so far. They've been pretty limited in their abilities to, to organize. So I would put them in a different category to the cartels. And I would say the cartels,

The Cardals in some way are like quite woke compared to the gangs, like in terms of the opportunities that women appear to have had

taken and achieved in the cartels compared to the matter, you know. 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,

bossing it the way that we saw Guadalupe and Luz and Digno and other women doing in the cartels, I'd say. Yeah, I think from my own experiential point in that region, it's more the odd lieutenant in those organizations gets a chance to sort of skip up and become a cog in the machine for the cartels, but mostly they're actually too

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 visited her in prison. She was sentenced to 135 years in prison for kidnapping and murder. This is not... It's like unhinged levels of violence, some of these street gangs in Central America. And she's by far not alone in that.

She's not, but I also think, you know, she was embroiled in this like local political bloodsport, 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 a tax and like create a relationship with you.

So that was what Marixa 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 this, tried to have him killed three times. One of those attempts on his life happened when she was already in prison. So yeah,

My point is, as is often the case with organized crime, it's quite hard to actually get to what actually happened. I got her version, I got his version, I spoke to the anti-narcotics prosecutor and people who knew them both. And it seemed to me that he was terrified of her and he put her away or...

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, you need when you, when, when someone needs to be disposed of out the way, you know, so, 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, she was a bad girl. Um, but there are probably plenty of other bad girls and bad boys who are enjoying the fruits of their criminal labor 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 parlay 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 is a huge... Like Marixa was moving in the cartel world. She wasn't moving in the gang world. So I think... I know that seems like a small distinction, but it's actually pretty massive. It's kind of like comparing McDonald's to a local burger chain 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 Marikza wasn't moving 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 the boat and like a large amount. Okay. Which is all to say, you know, a lot of the elites have their hand in the game. Yeah. Okay. He was 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 drug trafficking side, 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 ended up being assassinated before her death,

before she took power or she tried to take power, also had a reputation for being very violent and ruthless. And that's very unusual. I think there is this tendency for us to perceive women as much more submissive, less ambitious, less antagonistic. And both Marikza and her sister Myra just usurped all of that. And I wonder if it's much more common now

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. There's so much information to construct narratives and understand scenes. And so I think there are lots more women who are incarcerated in Latin America, active in Latin America in criminal organizations that just manage to remain invisible because they haven't come onto the radar of U.S. law enforcement. And quite honestly, it's really the DEA who does the deep work

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 to the to the anti-narcotics prosecutor in 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 if you see what I mean yeah yeah um

Well, I was going to ask you, I mean, your book came out in July. So I'll say the title again. It's Narcos, The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's Cartels. And you do, you're writing regularly for Vice and you have a sub stack 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 stories that you're sort of deep in the middle of?

Yeah, I'm having a lot of conversations about what, if anything, comes next from the book. So podcasts, possibility documentaries. I have a novel in the works that's based on a female journalist protagonist in Latin America who...

covers and has to sort of break bad to get himself out of trouble. Yes. Um, and yeah, I'm also, 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,

a massacre in a women's prison in Honduras where basically a bunch of Barrio 18 women slaughtered women from the MS-13 gang. Most of the prisons in Latin America are home to gangs and the gangs tend to live in different cells and live in 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 the how women are moving within within the matter in Central America and like whether there is any real emancipation going on or whether it's Whether it's just ground-level stuff, but I'm just fascinated by you know Especially like as a reporter like a 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 their criminal exploits if they're trying to get green cards or S visas or the right to 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 crime.

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. Without a doubt. I mean, one of the challenges of, you know, I'm having a lot of conversations about possible screen manifestations of narcas. It's like there's this desire to sort of squeeze women into these male narratives, right? So like the female Chapo 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 roles and new voices for women and new...

gave them sort of new places in in our understanding of organized crime and i'm really excited to see um griselda which is based on griselda blanco the the colombian drug trafficking patriarch from the from the 70s and 80s that's due out on netflix in the next couple of months i think um and that's produced by uh sofia vergaras 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 her 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, from the, from the series yet, but I'm, 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, so much changing in terms of like the relationship between,

um, extremists and riots and whatever, you know, Hollywood's kind of a standstill right now because of this strike. But I do think, you know, I am, 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 radicals, Mexico, um,

how, you know, you did have an Edina Arellano Felix or the woman based on her who was part of the Felix Arellano 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. Yeah.

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, um,

you know, ingratiate themselves 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 are,

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, 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 on men in the woman's life, I guess. Yeah.

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, I think in this climate and the way that gender is being framed nowadays, I think, um,

their 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, um,

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 Narcos series? Like it's 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...

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 ever so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm delighted and I'm keen to hear what your listeners think. Thank you.