by Elaine Carey
To the Ends of the Earth is the first film to document transnational drug smuggling and the role of women as key in this enterprise, well before the sensationalist images of women in Scarface or Traffic or María Full of Grace.129 The film challenged censors in the immediate post–World War II era with its edgy topics of drug and human trafficking and interracial sexual attraction. The censors relented and allowed the release of this story about international police fighting the narcotics epidemic as well as transgressive sexual desire. The Loeffelholz-Brandstatter group had not only challenged the crime fighters of Mexico and the United States but also contributed to a provocative shift in popular culture in the post–World War II era. The film challenged censorship rules by depicting lurid topics, but it also portrayed transnational policing and investigation. These depictions, however, had a purpose: to educate viewers about the evils and dangers of drugs.130
Maria Wendt was an exceptional mule due to her education and her transnational and familial ties that stretched across continents. These attributes, enhanced by her cosmopolitanism, added to the pop culture titillation that resulted in the production of To the Ends of the Earth. Women, traditionally thought of as marginal to the drug trade, are in fact instrumental to illicit flows whether they act as small-time peddlers or transnational mules. Wendt is remarkable because of her ties to a transnational drug ring. Her significance lies in her ties to men who had gamed the system to such a degree that they came to be viewed as threats to the security and physical health of the United States and Mexico. Although initially Wendt, like most women in the drug trade, appeared to play only a small role, she was in fact a nexus between the drug traffickers and policing agents, between East and West, between educated and uneducated, between men and women.
Wendt’s case offers some similarities to women operating today in the global drug market. For whatever reason, she embarked on a career as a mule, whether for excitement or for profit. Many women who did not have the education or access to networks that Wendt enjoyed were forced to seek innovative means for economic survival, and carried drugs out of necessity. Indeed, most women who engaged in drug peddling and trafficking did so at a small level, often with family members, and over various periods of time. Similar to prostitution, women moved in and out of drug vending. The buying and selling of illegal drugs allowed certain women to survive in a time when they had few economic options. Whether Wendt entered the trade as an equal partner, as an entrepreneur seeking greater economic mobility, or as a thrill seeker, she had peers who resorted to smuggling and peddling for all these reasons. Some women, though, took their role a step further, competing directly with men in the higher levels of organized crime or even at the highest levels of political power.
CHAPTER THREE
THE WHITE LADY OF MEXICO CITY
Lola la Chata and the Remaking of Narcotics
ON APRIL 27, 1945, MEXICAN PRESIDENT MANUEL ÁVILA CAMACHO issued a presidential decree that waived constitutional guarantees in cases of narcotics trafficking and permitted the immediate detention of peddlers and smugglers at the federal penitentiary at Tres Marías without trial in the Mexican courts.1 Moreover, he issued a second decree ordering the minister of the interior and all police agencies throughout the country to arrest “public enemy number one”: the infamous narcotics trafficker Lola la Chata.
In the United States, Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry J. Anslinger received word from a “special employee” working in Mexico in the 1940s about the pending arrest of this prominent criminal. Anslinger immediately passed the information on to the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. He attached a history of la Chata. Because her growing narcotics empire had been a concern for Mexican as well as U.S. officials since the early 1930s, these actions were culminations of earlier decisions.
Ávila Camacho’s presidential decree followed by Anslinger’s correspondence to Hoover highlighted the perceived transnational threat of Lola la Chata’s drug empire. La Chata’s career demonstrated a more insidious threat compared to a woman such as Maria Wendt. Wendt worked as a mule for an organization controlled and operated by men. La Chata greatly differs from Wendt because she emerged as a dominant figure in the illicit narcotics trade during a time when the United States and Mexico were collaborating on narcotics arrests. During her era, criminologists, policy makers, and international women’s organizations all reacted against an emerging epidemic of narcotics abuse that victimized men and women and that threatened society on both sides of the border, weakening the social fabric through disease, economic difficulty, and crime.2 As a boss rather than a mule or small-time smuggler, la Chata serves as a representative of and predecessor to the emerging popular-culture manifestations of traffickers, lieutenants, and bosses.3 From localized peddler to international trafficker, her role in the business of narcotics reveals that the trade could offer similar rewards to women that it did to men.4 La Chata and women like her complicate popular masculine constructions of the illegal drug business, particularly in urban settings. Her role disrupts the view that women were passive and naïve victims of the trade, lured and tricked into drug trafficking by the vices and whims of male peddlers.5 Or, that women were limited to the lower echelons of drug trafficking. Neither a victim nor a small-time peddler, Lola la Chata was an opportunist who became wealthy and well respected in the informal economic and criminal underworld. She eventually led an organized crime family that extended throughout Mexico.
This chapter documents la Chata’s thirty-year career as a heroin peddler, trafficker, and crime boss. It also considers the efforts of police, government officials, and diplomats on both sides of the border to undermine her, while using her to justify shifts in policy in both the United States and Mexico. Like her counterparts, whether male or female, la Chata was seen as a threat to civilization, since her involvement in illicit trade brought her wealth but also access to power, defying all expectations for a woman of her race and class. Differing from Wendt and small-time smugglers, peddlers, and mules, la Chata endangered perceptions of Mexican and U.S. societies because she ruptured the normative expectations of what it meant to be a woman and to be civilized by using limited and constrained forms of feminine power to become a transnational threat.6
Like her mother before her, who had sold morphine and marijuana in an open-air market in Mexico City, la Chata used the space of the open street market—a feminine economic site—as the basis of her enterprise. She relied on her own familial relations as well as informal networks to circumnavigate structures of constraint placed upon her because of her sex and class.7 In turn, she and her successors reoriented the social and economic positions of their families within the illicit market. She revealed her fluidity and flexibility when confronted with government policy changes as well as changes wrought by modernization. Her actions threatened the Mexican government by exposing it to inspection and ridicule by the United States. Mexican officials were mocked at international narcotics meetings, as they had been criticized in the past for the country’s growing drug addiction problem. The Mexican government was cast as corrupt and inept. This scorn further translated into direct action whereby the FBN violated Mexico’s national sovereignty by issuing demands and placing agents in the country.8 More importantly, the FBN targeted certain Mexican researchers, particularly Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, who countered Anslinger’s tales of “reefer madness” with scientific studies that concluded that marijuana did not trigger violent criminal acts. La Chata’s success serves as a lens through which the North American drug czars viewed the alleged incompetence of Mexican authorities. Despite la Chata’s threat and her extended influence, policy makers continued to view her femininity and her ethnicity as potential weaknesses as they struggled to undermine her.
SELLING WOMEN: A GIRL FROM LA MERCED
Lola la Chata—María Dolores Estévez Zuleta—was born in 1906 and grew up in La Merced barrio in Mexico City.9 La Merced was notorious for its “quantity of thieves” and its poverty.10 Du
ring la Chata’s lifetime, La Merced grew due to an influx of migrants from the provinces and its ever-increasing formal and informal economic activities.11 It was and continues to be a hamlet of thieves but also a vigorous market of both legal and illegal commodities.12 Today, as in the early twentieth century, vendors and peddlers in the district ply crockery, food, clothing, live animals, lotions, potions, herbs, powder, spells, and other substances to help alleviate virtually any human ailment. Any type of sexual act can also be purchased. Thus, the barrio provides the perfect educational environment for a budding trafficker. Young Estévez worked in her mother’s food stall selling chicharron (pork rinds) and coffee. Later, her mother expanded to more lucrative markets: marijuana and morphine. At the age of thirteen, Estévez entered the trade working as her mother’s mule, running drugs from the stall in La Merced to customers.
Young Lola and her mother were not unique in the buying and selling of marijuana. Women and men sold these illegal commodities in the streets of Mexico City for local consumption.13 Street-vending children like Estévez moved through the city with this contraband in open or covered baskets.14 Just as smugglers employed their children as vessels of transportation or as foils to distract customs agents, small-time drug peddlers used their own children to sell marijuana in areas where they would be less conspicuous to the authorities, like schools and playgrounds. The fact that parents induced their children to sell marijuana and other illegal substances led to shock and outrage on both sides of the border.15 Parents acculturated their own children into the life, ensuring that the practices of addiction and selling passed from one generation to the next.16 Newspapers and official reports decried this use of children, and public health authorities blamed parents for their children’s addiction and selling.17
Figure 12. María Dolores Estévez Zuleta walks on the street with plates of food. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 14834, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Most likely, Estévez’s work as a child mule for her mother helped her learn the local terrain of peddling; the Mexican Revolution forced her to learn quickly and further her skills. The chaos of war led people to migrate around the country to escape the violence, seek work, or emigrate to the United States for greater economic opportunity. Estévez was no exception. Through her work as a mule in La Merced, she met Castro Ruiz Urquizo, who may have also been a street dealer.18 With Ruiz, she went to Ciudad Juárez, where she learned the skills of transnational trafficking from one of the most prominent trafficking families on the border.19
Her time in Ciudad Juárez expanded her future career in both personal and professional ways. There, she gave birth to two daughters, Dolores and María Luisa, who appear to have been the daughters of Ruiz.20 Her daughters ultimately followed her into the trade, creating a business matriarchy of sorts. In Ciudad Juárez, Estévez would have been introduced to transnational trafficking. Ciudad Juárez served as a main port for illicit trade with the United States, whether alcohol or narcotics. Her education on the border ensured that her destiny would not remain localized in small-time drug peddling. Eventually, she made her way back to Mexico City, and, like her mother, she ran a market stall that sold cheap lunches as her legitimate business cover. From that stall in La Merced, Lola la Chata began to build her marijuana, morphine, and heroin empire in the 1920s.
La Chata went unnoticed by the authorities for much of the 1920s. By the late 1930s, her name appeared in official documents in both the United States and Mexico. Her success coincided with government policy shifts that led to greater scrutiny of narcotics smugglers by the U.S. government. As discussed previously, in 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution overturned Prohibition. With the end of Prohibition, government agencies turned their attention from alcohol to the menace that was sweeping across the country’s southern border: narcotics.21 As demonstrated with the case of Maria Wendt, U.S. drug policy toward Mexico became more focused in the 1930s with the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) housed in the Treasury Department.22
In the United States, Harry Anslinger became somewhat of a celebrity in regard to the decadence and decline of an America that was allegedly under attack by Black, Latino, and Asian hordes who brought their vices to the United States.23 Anslinger was known for his use of racist language in describing drug dealers. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau disciplined Anslinger for releasing an all-points bulletin that described a suspect as a “ginger-colored nigger.”24 This reference enraged Morgenthau, who called Anslinger to his office and considered having him removed from his position. Anslinger, using racist language, also tended to associate marijuana distribution and use with African Americans and Mexicans. Anslinger claimed that he originally became interested in narcotics control due to the overwhelming numbers of female addicts prior to the passage of the Harrison Act, and he remained gravely concerned about female drug use.25 In Anslinger’s mind, drug use led white women to engage in miscegenation and turn to prostitution to support their addiction.
Women, too, fit into these constructs of deviance that Anslinger detailed in his books, articles, and speeches at public meetings and other venues. Women, he argued, were more prone to addiction to narcotics such as heroin and laudanum. Female criminal addicts often used poisons to kill their husbands and partners. And they also engaged in drug trafficking. Anslinger recalled a case in 1942 centered on Jack W. Morse and Sallie Elsie Morse, an Anglo couple who relocated to San Diego from Norfolk, Virginia. Sallie had accumulated over $40,000 (2012: $564,000) from what Anslinger characterized as “antisocial activities.” With that money, the Morse couple bought opium from Enrique Diarte, who was a supply source for Tijuana. Anslinger described Diarte as “one of the most flagrant smugglers” operating out of Tijuana and Mexicali. He worked with another husband-and-wife team, Jesús Velázquez and Consuelo Landeros de Velázquez, who were arrested transporting 175 ounces of opium and 20 ounces of pure heroin.26 Anglo and Mexican women often worked alongside their partners in the drug trade. In The Traffic in Narcotics, Anslinger argues that the Morse and Velázquez cases are similar. However, Sallie managed to raise a substantial sum of money for a major buy; Consuelo and her husband appear to be lower-level mules rather than distributors or suppliers.
Anslinger remained concerned about Mexico. He made frequent trips to the country, communicated with Mexican authorities, and exchanged information. However, despite his efforts to forge fruitful relationships with Mexican officials, Anslinger grew frustrated with Mexico’s divergent responses to drugs. Many Mexicans disagreed with Anslinger’s assertion that addicts, sellers, and traffickers were all merely criminals; these Mexicans tended to view drug addiction as a disease. In turn, Anslinger never tried to understand the Mexican view of narcotics or the country’s efforts to stem the flow of narcotics trafficking and addiction.27 Rather, in the United States as well as in Mexico, he continued to assert his position that drug use was a crime, not a sickness. He disagreed with the approach of medical doctors in both countries who studied addiction and saw it as a medical problem that deserved treatment rather than imprisonment.
With the end of the Mexican Revolution, the government began to act on its mounting concerns about the rise of narcotics abuse in the cities. As discussed in chapter 1, Mexican officials grew concerned about the vices of foreigners, particularly Chinese immigrants, who were perceived as a threat to the nation by introducing disease as well as economic competition.28 The condemnation of foreigners in Mexico—regardless of their national origin—as responsible for the increase in drug trafficking stemmed from xenophobic and feminized discourses that painted them, especially the Chinese, as a danger to the Mexican nation, very similar to arguments developed in the United States.29
Despite the creation of a public enemy who could be blamed for the introduction of opium and the rise in drug trafficking, by the 1930s the chief of alcohol and narcotics service of the
Department of Health, Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra (1938–1939), realized that drug addiction and peddling were no longer minor problems associated exclusively with the Chinese or with students, bohemians, and sailors. Salazar documented drug use in Mexico City among prostitutes, the poor, and other vulnerable populations. His work as a medical doctor challenged views held by early Mexican criminologists such as Julio Guerrero and Carlos Roumagnac.30
In 1938, Salazar published the results of a fourteen-year study on marijuana use that he conducted in the hospitals of Mexico City. In “The Myth of Marijuana,” he argued that marijuana was less dangerous than tobacco.31 He also claimed that only in the United States did marijuana seem to provoke crime. In conclusion, he suggested that drug addicts should receive medical care rather than be treated as criminals.32 A medical doctor rather than a criminologist, Salazar viewed addiction from a medical perspective. His research led him to express sympathy for addicts, and he ultimately blamed peddlers, not addicts, as the criminals.
Notwithstanding his differences with Anslinger over addiction, Salazar considered peddling and smuggling part of growing crisis that threatened the nation and complicated its relations with the United States.33 Consequently, la Chata’s growing success brought her unwanted attention from officials on both sides of the border that had potentially damaging repercussions to her business.34 Both in Mexico City and in the provinces, la Chata’s mules covertly moved her heroin in small packets with religious stamps on the front or in the bases of yoyos. In the 1930s and 1940s, heroin was routinely sold in small packets, or papelitos. The religious stamp on the packets may have been some sort of brand that identified her heroin. Toys have also been a common vessel for transportation because of a perception that they are harmless items associated with children. Yoyos have bases and wooden bodies that can be hollowed out and filled with heroin. La Chata built her empire in the way she knew best, as understood by women: through familial and sexual connections.35 She married an ex–police officer, Enrique Jaramillo, whose auto mechanic shop in Pachuca, Hidalgo, served as a distribution center and whose police contacts provided invaluable networks and protection. Although they were rumored to have divorced to suppress criticism of impropriety, her “marriage” to the police force provided alliances with police officers, bureaucrats, and politicians, many of whom she paid for information and protection.36