Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Many women smugglers had male partners who furthered their careers, but a few were the architects of their own transnational crime syndicates.25 More commonly, women served as complements to the trafficking businesses of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. While men moved drugs across borders, women controlled local distribution, particularly to other women. To ensure the continued success of their enterprises, women resorted to co-optation, bribery, manipulation, and, if necessary, violence. They also embraced stereotypical, gendered rhetoric to avoid imprisonment by exploiting tales of victimization. More often, their exercise of power ensured the attention of political and police figures throughout North America due to their notoriety in the trade. Women traffickers, then as today, were sensationalized as sexual deviants. In turn, these women informed policy, policing, and political practices, but more significantly they transformed cultural and social assumptions.26

  This work also intersects with the emerging body of literature on the history of crime and narcotics in the Americas.27 The rise of the Mexican narcotics trade and the first drug war came during the apex of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s, and the trade flourished in the 1930s. In the wake of the revolution, Mexico sought to revitalize the economic, social, political, and cultural life of the nation. Despite the rhetoric of revolutionary change, Mexican officials abandoned certain Porfirian ideals about crime and punishment while embracing others—particularly those that dealt with race. Certain attributes became associated with certain races particularly regarding shiftlessness, laziness, and criminality. They passed laws regulating certain practices such as public drunkenness and prostitution, which they deemed dangerous to the health of the nation.28 By the mid-1920s, the governments of Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924) and Plutarco Calles (1924–1928) included the regulation of narcotics as part of revitalization of the nation and the means by which to build new citizens.29 This shift occurred because of the global pressure to curtail drug trafficking, use, and addiction that heightened during the 1920s. Moreover, illicit trade undermined domestic production in Mexico and hampered the growth of the legitimate economy. Policy makers thus tried to address the problem through cooperation with the United States, which was demanding that Mexico exercise greater control over narcotics and criminalize consumption.

  Recent scholarship on illicit flows and globalization has recognized the overlapping consequences of the market in a global environment. Due to Mexico’s shared and often unregulated border with the United States, a space of trade existed. As Carolyn Nordstrom has written, markets are everywhere, concurrently central and peripheral in a global economy, and the relevance of the moral state is redefined particularly in border regions where laws, capital, and commodities flow. Movements of people and culture are constantly renegotiated.30 Since I pay close attention to border regions and the transnational flows of drugs, I note a frontier ambiance of freedom, danger, and profit that men and women experience equally.31 Here, people continually navigate between diverse spaces—whether between one country and another, one set of laws and another, or the illicit versus the licit. This continued renegotiation of markets, laws, and cultures ensured flexibility in relationships and social status, including gender. Outside border zones, men and women recognized gaps in policing or state control of certain spaces, such as in cities and even rural areas. They took full advantage of the economic and social openings available to them by engaging in behavior that in certain sectors was deemed illicit but in others widely accepted and even encouraged. Drugs thus operated within varying definitions of “legal,” depending on the environment in which business was conducted.

  Moreover, women in the trade ruptured the normative expectations of what it meant to be a woman by using limited and constrained forms of feminine power to build criminal empires at a time when most other women were galvanized by the revolutionary ideals in Mexico to work in education or public health. Some women took on greater public roles, but other poor and illiterate women did not have the good fortune to be selected for such campaigns. For instance, in chapter 4 I discuss Lola la Chata, who created a transnational drug trafficking organization that operated from the 1930s until her death in the 1950s. In analyzing revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexican history, historians have discussed how women mobilized to teach in schools, organized feminist meetings (although they did not receive the vote until 1953), entered professions, and became politically engaged.32 They became instrumental in the creation of revolutionary ideals by their own zeal, yet women such as Lola la Chata, poor, illiterate, and mestiza, remained on the margins of these revolutionary ideas.

  Compared to the elite social spheres, women of the lower classes had a vastly different experience during the revolution and in the postrevolutionary process of modernization. While some readily worked for the modern nation, many were not selected or motivated to become the foremothers of revolutionary ideals. Instead, for women such as Lola la Chata and others mentioned in this book, the revolution brought upheaval and displacement. And yet this same upheaval also provided them with hands-on education in transnational trafficking along the border or within internal urban spaces in conflict that could serve as sites of peddling. During the apex of revolutionary zeal in the 1930s, a time that also witnessed global depression and an increased demand for drugs, certain women seized opportunities to consolidate narcotics empires by taking advantage of the weaknesses inherit in a state in transition.

  By examining women as central figures in the drug trade, I interrogate the “public secret” of drugs, modernity, and nation.33 Women and men of elite and lower classes and from diverse nations entered the trade, yet so too did the middle class. I argue that traffickers created cross-class and crossethnic alliances across the globe long before the term “globalization” even emerged.34 Women adopted certain cultural and gendered roles to construct prominent criminal enterprises and crime families, but they also employed strategic essentialist arguments about gender and maneuvered to resist, undermine, manipulate, or co-opt police and government authorities.

  Ironically, the family played a key role in smuggling alcohol and narcotics.35 Parents trained and educated their children in the trade particularly to sell in places where adults would have been conspicuous, such as schools and playgrounds. As Nordstrom has noted, and many scholars of Latin America have confirmed, women are the center of the family and construct the basic elements of society and culture and, in turn, the nation.36 Women create families whether men are present or not. Men have enjoyed more fluidity and movement historically and socially, but women forge the basic links of society: they produce food, provide daily necessities, and establish communal networks and market systems. The ability of women to do so ensures their and their children’s survival. Their ability to forge substantial familial and communal networks ensured that certain women traffickers and peddlers remained in the trade for decades longer than many men. Thus the role of family as an integral part of both the informal and formal social networks that facilitated narcotics peddling is crucial.

  In the first chapter, “Foreign Vices: Drugs, Modernity, and Gender,” I examine the emergence of the shared narconarratives regarding race and moral degeneration in North America that created a transnational language of “vice.” With the end of the Mexican Revolution and the rebuilding of the nation, public health drew considerable attention from new national leaders. With the establishment of the Secretaría de Salud (Department of Health), Mexican leaders attempted to modernize the nation and its people.

  Due to its proximity to the United States, Mexico has played a key role in the smuggling of alcohol and drugs and as a site of transshipment of Asian and European opiates. Instead of recognizing drugs as both an internal and an external problem, Mexican revolutionary rhetoric and zeal became a tool wielded against immigrants. Mexican citizens’ letters and organized groups led by men and women employed the language of the revolution and that of the new national goals to target internal enemies, who were blamed for the degeneration of
the race (la raza).

  On both sides of the border, government officials blamed foreign enemies within their midst for the introduction of narcotics and drug use. National leaders turned against their own citizens, constructing a national narrative of deviancy that they directed at various groups at different times. These campaigns targeted certain immigrants (whether legal or illegal) such as German and Chinese immigrants who were seen as collaborators in “racial tainting.” Nationalist, racist, and gendered rhetoric fueled such campaigns, creating a collusion between policy and popular culture that spawned images of “users,” “addicts,” “sellers,” and “victims.”

  In chapter 2, “Mules, Smugglers, and Peddlers: The Illicit Trade in Mexico, 1910s–1930s,” I address smuggling, which created a controversy on both sides of the border in the context of the first war on drugs that emerged in the 1930s. I consider the transnational transformation of narcotics policing, peddling, and trafficking from the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in the United States in 1914 to the rise and fall of Prohibition (1919–1933), which brought an even greater focus on narcotics. Beginning in the 1910s, the role of women in contraband, from the smuggling of certain items usually associated with women’s traditional work such as sewing and cooking items to their role in the creation of chief narcotics ports along the U.S.-Mexico border and the establishment of transnational networks, drew more and more scrutiny from customs and police agencies.

  Examining female bootleggers and the emergence of narcotics mules and smugglers in the wake of the Harrison Act, I explore how the shifting terrain of drug trafficking offered women economic opportunities. The U.S. and Mexican governments, particularly customs agents, responded to these shifts by collaborating in key international cases such as that of Maria Wendt, an infamous mule, whose arrest in California led to the dismantling of a global opium trafficking network based in Mexico City that extended across three continents.

  In chapter 3, “The White Lady of Mexico City: Lola la Chata and the Remaking of Narcotics,” I introduce a crime boss based in Mexico City. In 1945, President Manuel Ávila Camacho issued an arrest warrant for “public enemy number one” Lola la Chata (María Dolores Estévez Zuleta). She emerged as a heroin peddler par excellence in Mexico City and operated from the 1930s until her death in 1959. Her story was central to the struggle between narcotics peddlers and traffickers and the government. Her contacts within the Mexican police and government revealed the extent of her power, and her “golden arms” extended from Mexico to Toronto, where Canadian organized crime peddled Mexican heroin during a time when heroin abuse was allegedly declining due to World War II, a conflict that severed the heroin routes from Asia and Europe. Her career helped create the modern image of the Mexican drug trafficker as a prevailing threat, an image more commonly associated with men.

  I examine the U.S.-Mexico border as a site of vice and danger in chapter 4, “Transcending Borders: La Nacha and the ‘Notorious’ Women of the North.” Another famous trafficker and contemporary of Lola la Chata, Ignacia Jasso la viuda (widow) de González, also known as la Nacha, operated in Ciudad Juárez. La Nacha and other women of the border exemplified an ongoing negotiation of drug war policies along the U.S.-Mexico border. What makes la Nacha even more fascinating is her position as a transnational narcotics dealer whom the U.S. government attempted to extradite for violation of the Harrison Act in 1942 even though she had not been arrested in the United States.

  La Nacha and her supporters successfully fought the extradition order and continued to operate as suppliers for peddlers in the United States. By the time of her death in the early 1980s, she, like Lola la Chata, had spawned a multigenerational peddling and trafficking family whose ties reached throughout Mexico and into the United States. Her life further illuminates the role of women as wives and mothers in the trade who created family-based enterprises.

  In chapter 5, “The Women Who Made It Snow: Cold, Dirty Drug Wars, 1970s,” I consider the shift of political and national focus in North America from heroin to cocaine. In 1975, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proclaimed “no antiwoman job bias in the narcotics trade,” in response to key arrests of women from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela who were involved in the trafficking of cocaine into the United States.

  Beginning in the 1960s, Mexico served as a site of cocaine transshipment for the U.S. market, and women were key to that development. As the United States focused on the flow of heroin coming across the border from Mexico, new routes to move heroin emerged. The focus on the heroin trade ensured a shift from heroin to cocaine. Collaboration between U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement agents at the border disrupted flows from the south to the north and undermined certain organized crime trafficking families such as the Hernández organization in Tijuana. Those policing efforts led to a shift to other locations and the emergence of new players such as the Chilean Yolanda Sarmiento, who played a significant role in recentering the heroin market, demonstrating a transnational cross-ethnic alliance. “The Godmother” Griselda Blanco also emerged as a central transnational cocaine boss, who led DEA agents on a chase that lasted over ten years.

  In the conclusion, “Gangsters, Narcs, and Women: A Secret History,” I return to contemporary depictions of women in the drug economy as it flows across borders, to contextualize the representation of women in relation to depictions of masculinity. Male traffickers and narcotics agents are celebrated in song, literature, film, and other media. The victimization of women and children remains tangential to the encomiums of performative masculinity whether by drug traffickers, policing agents, bankers, or politicians.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOREIGN VICES

  Drugs, Modernity, and Gender

  IN THE 1920S AND 1930S, MEXICAN OFFICIALS STRUGGLED TO UNITE people under new ideas of nationhood in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. That search for identity would come at the expense of Mexico’s foreign-born population, who would become linked in the public mind—often falsely—to crime and drugs. Racializing crime occurred in the United States and Canada as well, and, in the 1920s and 1930s especially, foreign residents and citizens in all countries endured the public’s fears of drugs and vice. Foreign men and women served as vehicles to construct arguments of deviancy but also new conceptions of nation. Chinese immigrants bore the brunt of these ideas, due to racism and because native-born and mestizo Mexicans perceived that they presented economic competition. Foreign-born men and women who used or trafficked drugs or who were perceived to have done so were sensationalized as threats to the emerging Mexican nation. In turn, immigrant doctors, businesspeople, pharmacists, and countless others found themselves labeled by their neighbors, including local and national politicians and bureaucrats as well as ordinary citizens, as the architects of vice and depravity. In other words, certain people associated other citizens or immigrants as illicit and dangerous to the emerging nation.

  In April 1935, Juan de Dios Bojórquez, the secretary of the interior for the Mexican state of Durango, received a letter from M. Durán, a concerned citizen. In the letter, the author complained about his neighbor, Vida Nahum Altaled. He wrote:

  In this town [Durango] lives a woman of Turkish origin whose name is Vida Nahum Altaled who owns an establishment called the TIPTOP precisely in the main square, the source for most Durango addicts who require that which is indispensable to mitigate the effects of withdrawal.

  Ms. Vida Nahum Altaled lives in a love relationship with her brother, and they make frequent trips to bring—as they say “new blood”—young women that they exploit in this city. . . . In the house of Nahum, people gamble and drink, and she provides drugs and women to her friends. She has never been punished due to the complicity of the Durango police that has to do with the police commander. Besides, this lady has entry papers to the Republic and then she has Izquierdo [the chief of police] to defend her when questioned. I hope these facts serve to help the work of moralization.1

  Bojórquez pursued this
citizen’s complaint by forwarding the letter to the governor of the state of Durango. In turn, Bojórquez initiated a criminal investigation of Nahum and her brother Sam. When, how, or who conducted the investigation remained undocumented. Yet, by June 21, 1935, the investigation ended with Leopoldo Alvarado, the subsecretary of the state of Durango, concluding that Nahum Altaled “lived an honest life and was dedicated to her business of selling clothes.” Moreover, she and her brother were not lovers, but Sam was living with her while he was getting a divorce.2 Thus, the state of Durango closed the case.

  Despite the brevity of the investigation, the siblings Vida and Sam Nahum illuminate the complex intersections between modernity, gender, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, and financial gain in ways that contrast with the ideals of a new nation with its focus on hygiene, sanitation, political order, and legal economic growth. The brother and sister drew the suspicion of their neighbors for a number of reasons. First, they were foreigners in a highly nationalistic postrevolutionary Mexico. Originally from Turkey—a country known for its production of opium—they made frequent trips abroad to conduct and support their clothing retail business. Their success as entrepreneurs appeared to have fueled the suspicions of their native-born neighbors.

  Their perceived economic success, their country of origin, and their physical mobility drew concern from a fellow citizen at a time of heightened nationalism during the 1930s and growing concern over vices that might undermine the social health and hygiene of the nation. The Mexican government embarked on a campaign to improve social hygiene and people’s health after years of revolution and economic stagnation. Its leaders turned to controlling vices such as selling and using drugs that they perceived degenerated the society and undermined the concepts of the new nation and the modernization efforts to rebuild the battered country.