Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Rarely did officials denote in their documentation that the women worked as comerciantes, or professional vendors. Instead, inspectors listed their employment as housewife, housekeeper, laundress, or unemployed. And yet, the agents relied on their own interpretations of what the women told them. Of course, a woman who was smuggling for profit would never mention that she was going to resell the items. Agents, however, noted that the items were to be sold from their homes or in their hometowns. Despite working in the secondary market and providing for their families, women opted not to state their own work in documents and self-reported their employment as housewives. This discrepancy ensured that the women received smaller fines and shorter sentences. Also, it demonstrates their own ability, whether conscious or not, to manipulate customs agents and the law.

  Customs officials often detained Mexican women who crossed international ports of entry on foot; other, more affluent or better-connected women, however, used automobiles. In their cars, they packed clothing, dishes, cloth, foods, and other items inside the seats or under the floorboards. By embracing more sophisticated means of transport that enabled greater profits, these women appeared to be entrepreneurs. For example, Natalía Ortíz Ramos la viuda de Cerda from Ciudad Juárez crossed the international bridge from El Paso in 1937. Customs official Manuel Peralta found in the seat of her truck clothing for men, women, and children, plates and cups, glassware, and salt.49 In 1939, Manuela Ortíz Rodríguez de Caballeros drove her children in her Plymouth across the international border. Under the seats, she had packed thirty-six dresses and other clothing. At times, children within the family assisted in smuggling items.50 In 1936, Carmen Cantú de Garza, a forty-seven-year-old housewife from Monterrey, smuggled clothing while accompanied by her two daughters and a friend. The inspectors checked them because they appeared to be wearing clothing that was too heavy for a spring day in Nuevo Laredo.51 Upon inspection, the officials found that the four had hidden automobile parts under their skirts. In addition to the auto parts, they also had layered clothing on their bodies, no doubt appearing quite bulky and even bowlegged.

  Cantú’s case demonstrates a couple of significant aspects of smuggling. Like other women, she employed her children. Children served a number of roles in the flow of contraband. Their presence in a car or as companions to their mothers or sisters on foot may have influenced whether inspectors searched a car or a group of pedestrians. Parents coached their children to assist them. Crying, whining, or complaining provided an excellent distraction for a distraught mother, who sought to divert attention from her smuggling. Children’s behavior could also disrupt customs agents trying to inspect a car or search a child’s mother. Children also served as carriers. If a woman such as Serna Mendoza was attempting to smuggle forty-eight pairs of stockings among other items on her own, a woman with a child would be able to cross with even more merchandise. Thus, children were instrumental to their mothers’ enterprises.

  In addition, Cantú’s smuggling of automobile parts, even on foot, suggests that she sought greater profit than what she could make from traditional items that women smuggled. Automobile parts, cars, guns, hardware, and livestock provided far more profit than clothing and food items. Men were far more involved than women in the smuggling of cars, car parts, guns, livestock, and heavy durable goods. Significantly, Cantú and her daughters may have been mules who smuggled such items for a man.

  The evidence also suggests that women traveled long distances to smuggle legal goods from the United States into Mexico. In 1937, Raquel Katz de Frenkel, a twenty-three-year-old married Polish immigrant who lived in Mexico City, was arrested in Nuevo Laredo with suitcases filled with clothing purchased in the United States.52 In 1936, Emilia Fabris Guica, a fifty-year-old Yugoslavian immigrant who lived in Mexico City, was arrested in the port of Veracruz attempting to smuggle new European clothing that she had hidden in dirty laundry.53 Soledad González Sandoval, a fifty-year-old single woman from Guanajuato, was arrested in Nogales for contraband activities. She, like the other women, was searched by a woman, in this case María Leonor Páez la viuda de Madrid.54 The movement of women from various parts of Mexico through international ports of entry, whether by land or sea, suggests that the risk of getting caught weighed less than the profit one could make. Moreover, it reflected an entrepreneurial spirit that enticed these women to take the risk.

  Like women, men also smuggled an array of commodities. In the documents, men appear more involved in the smuggling of higher-end commodities such as cattle, horses, and guns. However, they too used innovative means to smuggle less lucrative items. In 1936, Daniel Curiel Rodríguez, a twenty-three-year-old day laborer from Tamaulipas, used a launch to smuggle various food products from the United States into Mexico. Men, more than women, commonly employed launches and used the river system in the border area to smuggle animals and food across the border.55 One could smuggle far more on a launch than under one’s clothing. On Mexico’s coastlines, inspectors regularly detained fishing vessels and their crews to ensure that they were not smuggling. Men controlled the fishing industry, as they still do.

  Men dominated key areas of smuggling, particularly the smuggling of guns, which has been a lucrative trade in the twentieth century. Mexican government officials, Mormons, cowboys, bandits, and individual opportunists all smuggled guns into Mexico during the revolution using an array of innovative methods.56 But even in the midst of this masculine business, as historian Elizabeth Salas has documented, women have played a role.57 Like today, women drew less attention, and their clothing served as an excellent cover for weapons, which could be tied to their legs hidden by their skirts. Ammunition could be sewn into hems and hidden pockets or stashed into bags that women carried.

  The smuggling of legal goods to avoid paying fees and taxes reflects a long history of transnational commodities flows.58 Women employed children, adopted various forms of new technologies, and traveled long distances to engage in smuggling. Those whom inspectors detained, questioned, and prosecuted represent a small number of those who crossed the border on a regular basis weighted down with illegal clothing, makeup, or food. Often, punishment for such crimes was sporadic and minor. Smugglers generally received fines of forty to one hundred pesos and the loss of the merchandise.59 Those who smuggled on a larger scale with greater ingenuity—for instance, using an automobile—received greater fines and prison sentences. For example, Guadalupe Navarro de Cons, a forty-three-year-old vendor, was arrested with her driver in 1936, receiving a sentence of six months in jail and the impounding of her car.60 In 1937, Ola McDonald, a forty-two-year-old married woman from Eagle Pass, Texas, received a sentence of six months to two years. She was fined seven hundred pesos for smuggling tires into Mexico, which was a large fine for the time.61 As a U.S. citizen, McDonald could not have been smuggling for her own personal use in Mexico. She and other U.S. citizens involved in smuggling appeared to pay heavier fines than their Mexican peers.62 Cigarette smugglers, once detained, paid only a minor fine, and their property was confiscated. Most were quickly released.63

  The extent that women engaged in transnational contraband ensured that other women would be recruited on the enforcement side of customs and border patrolling. Women, it was thought, were better suited to search other women and children to avoid allegations of sexual impropriety. Male customs agents oversaw and monitored the people, animals, cars, and trucks moving through the ports of entry. They questioned and studied people, they searched vehicles, and if necessary they detained people. Women agents conducted the searches of suspected women and children on both sides of the border. With women on their staff, federal agents became more comfortable searching, seizing, and arresting women who they believed were involved in contraband.

  As women used their bodies as vessels for smuggling, customs agencies needed to employ not only women inspectors and matrons but also medical doctors and nurses to search suspects. In María Full of Grace, a female customs agent selects María for further inspection.
Due to her pregnancy, the customs agent is unable to x-ray her. In reality, body searches could be far more brutal.

  Over the years, policing has become more sophisticated and now employs more professionals and a greater range of technology. Women and their bodies have attracted growing attention as vessels for contraband. Few cases exist that document brutal body cavity searches for drugs, but a couple of examples do stand out. The 1940 case of Winnifred Chapman of Vancouver illuminates the medicalization of inspections and the escalation of violence used. Police agents suspected Chapman of selling opium. Although she and her partner, Henry Sherman, were Anglo, they maintained cross-ethnic alliances with the Vancouver Chinese community, who were their suppliers and their customers. They sold in cafés and teahouses frequented by both Anglos and Chinese. On July 31, 1940, in an undercover sting operation, a Vancouver constable took Chapman and Sherman into custody.64

  The agents separated Sherman and Chapman. First, they strip-searched Sherman, finding nothing. Believing then that Chapman held the opium, the matron and narcotics agents told her that she could give up the drugs voluntarily or that a police officer who was also a surgeon would search her. Chapman, described as “a girl of large physique hardened by her mode of living,” denied that she carried drugs on or in her body.

  The matrons and doctor escorted her to a doctor’s office that contained only a white examination table. With Chapman’s refusal, the surgeon offered her another opportunity to give up the drugs voluntarily in front of him and three matrons. She again refused. They obtained leather straps and forced her onto the table. Chapman struggled for more than thirty minutes. The doctor was unable to use any surgical instruments, but after half an hour he extracted two fingerstalls secured with rubber bands that contained a total of forty decks of opium (a deck may contain anywhere from one to fifteen grams).65 Fingerstalls are rubber finger or thumb coverings that were used by pharmacists, bank tellers, cashiers, and doctors, and they were used to transport narcotics and cocaine before the widespread adoption of condoms for that purpose.

  Chapman’s physical if not brutal body search demonstrates heightened panic on the part of enforcement agencies about drugs, and also a growing willingness to permit physical force. The bodies of women involved in selling were subject to scrutiny and search. Because of her working-class background, Chapman was readily subjected to a violent gynecological search, an indignity that an upper-class drug dealer or user would never have to submit to. The fact that a doctor, a police sergeant, and three prison matrons spent more than thirty minutes conducting a vaginal search demonstrates the power that officials could display over a criminal. Moreover, women using their bodies as vessels for contraband caused panic but also titillation. Why did the Vancouver authorities share this piece of evidence with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics? Despite the brutality of the search, Chapman did not disclose her supplier. She reported to the police that she had every intention of resuming peddling drugs in Vancouver once released.66 Obviously, the intrusive search that was a form of punishment did not deter her.

  As cross-border trade in illegal substances grew, so did the underground trade in legal contraband. The fact that people traveled great distances to smuggle clothes and soap reflected the growing demand for “foreign”—whether U.S. or European—goods, despite nationalistic rhetoric; one explanation is that domestic goods often cost more than their foreign equivalents. That demand fueled trade in contraband, just as the demand for drugs in the United States and Canada fueled the flow of opiates and marijuana from Mexico northward.

  In the late 1920s, the Bureau of Social Hygiene interviewed the five hundred women at the Alderson, West Virginia, prison for women. Of these prisoners, officials listed 317 as either drug users or drug sellers; 70 were sellers only. Their case studies depict the fluidity and mobility of young women involved in drugs. Some reported becoming addicted due to the men in their lives, some due to family members, and others due to their employers. One anonymous case highlighted transnational flows of drugs from Mexico to the United States.

  Jane Doe was born in 1891 in Texas, and her father was a newspaperman. She attended convent schools until she went to the University of Texas and majored in journalism.67 The summer of her sophomore year, she went to visit “a group of wild friends of hers,” and ended up dropping out of college and going to New York, where she fell in with Lefty Louis (Louis Rosenberg) and the Lenox Avenue Gang. Members of the gang went to jail for a murder in 1912 in which they killed a bookmaker, Herman Rosenthal, at the request of Police Lieutenant Charles Becker. Rosenberg’s sentence was execution.68 In 1912, “Jane” took a prolonged spring break in Mexico, placing her in the midst of the Mexican Revolution.

  She told social workers that she had fallen in love with a Mexican engineer who was an opium addict, and by the age of twenty she was as well. He eventually went straight but died fighting in the Mexican Revolution. Jane then embarked on a second relationship with a medical doctor who supplied her addiction. They divorced in 1922, and she returned to the United States, settling in California. There, she fell in with another gang that specialized in stealing furs, selling narcotics, and smuggling. She also served as a steerer, or “confidence worker” as she put it.69 Essentially, Jane worked with crooks to rob people. Her job was to ensure that targeted individuals came to trust her and her associates, in order to facilitate the fraud. In 1927, she was arrested on a narcotics charge, check forgery, and mail fraud, convicted, and sent to Alderson.

  Jane shares a number of commonalities with contemporary female drug peddlers and traffickers. An addict, she relied on her husband and lovers to supply her, and she saw crime as a means by which to supply her addiction. Her divorce from the Mexican doctor forced her to return to the United States. There, she fell into crime to support her habit. However, she returned to organized crime, where she previously had been a moll, a woman who associates with and works for the mob, a role she had played with the Lenox Avenue Gang.70 What is remarkable about Jane is that she could very well have established an opiate connection between a Mexican supplier and organized crime in the United States. In her statement, she argued that in Mexico she had been an addict, but she had moved in organized crime circles both in New York before moving to Mexico and later in Los Angeles. While living in Mexico, her opium would have been acquired locally, whether it had originated in Mexico or Asia. She would have gained access to and knowledge of the internal market as well as the larger Asian opium trade. As someone who moved across borders, she also would have been able to identify the lack of oversight and the inadequate policing on the border. Once she returned to the United States, she became involved in various criminal activities, but she only reported that she sold narcotics.

  Women as drug mules, whether smuggling for themselves or for someone else, operated as central components of the trade. Their bodies, accessories, and clothing—their femaleness—became tools for smugglers, whether of licit products such as clothing and automobile parts or of illegal products such as drugs. At times they worked for men, or they worked independently to support themselves or their families. Some women turned to smuggling because of their own addictions. Women such as Jane, who was an addict, also provided important skills. She worked as a partner within organizations and may have assisted men in identifying markets and suppliers.71

  While Jane’s case seemed sensational due to her transnational movements and her ties to organized crime in the 1910s and 1920s, by the 1930s and 1940s women who functioned as partners of men were drawing increasing recognition from customs and FBN officials. Margarita Rosas Trejo’s association with drug dealers drew the attention of the FBN. Harry Anslinger wrote in 1940:

  Trejo married her while drunk then left her. She lives with a drunkard Francisco Nunez, a smuggler of drugs. He takes drugs to San Diego and Solano Beach . . . and they smuggle marijuana. . . . Do not allow them to enter as they are dangerous, also Jose Rosas who recently entered the US without permission. His sister Josefina Per
res Chica lives in Solano with Juan Santoya . . . and she smuggles marijuana and other drugs. . . . She is always in Tijuana. . . . Consult with people in Solano Beach and they will tell you the kind of person she is. . . . Francisco Nunez the drunkard ask in Tijuana and Mexicali as to his smuggling activities. Jose Rosas lived over there (Ex. US) without permission with the man his sister lives with, his sister is fat and has two children. . . . She lives there in Tijuana and has immigration permission.72

  ILLICIT FLOWS IN CONTROLLED SPACES

  The flow of contraband did not only occur across borders. Illegal commodities flowed from cities into rural areas, through local controlled spaces. Women introduced illicit substances into controlled spaces such as prisons. In Mexico, and in many other parts of the world, families were expected to provide food, clothing, and other items to their family members who are imprisoned. If there were no family members who fulfilled such obligations, charities such as the Catholic Church donated needed items. During family visits, people also passed drugs. In 1931, Josefina Lara Paredes, a thirty-nine-year-old single woman, went to the prison in Tampico to visit her lover. She hid marijuana in the bags of fruit that she passed to him. Upon inspection, guards confiscated the marijuana, and she was later found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.73

  In 1938, thirty-year-old Antonia Rodríguez Ávila hid marijuana in a false bottom of a bottle of milk she brought for her husband in prison.74 She, too, was arrested at the prison. With food items, women demonstrated their creativity. They used tamales, fruit, and newspapers and other reading materials as vessels to conceal contraband from the prison staff. Women also mixed marijuana with tobacco and rolled cigarettes, thus passing drugs into the prison. María Albina Flores, a thirty-five-year-old domestic worker, was arrested in 1936 for passing marijuana that she disguised as other herbs to help alleviate her imprisoned husband’s suffering due to “the chronic sickness in his legs.”75