by Elaine Carey
Her relationship with Jaramillo provided some cover for her business, but Mexican and U.S. authorities soon recognized him as a successful trafficker as well. La Chata appears to have enjoyed a tremendous amount of respect, more than what women in Mexico or elsewhere might have expected at that time or even today. Barbara Denton has argued that women in the drug economy are seen as “personally unfit,” and, like the upper echelons of the formal economy, the illicit trade has always been seen as “a man’s world.”37 La Chata appears to have figured out that family alliances enable women to compete in the man’s world of drugs. The family ties of women in the drug trade have garnered greater attention in the contemporary media, but la Chata and others used their social networks at sophisticated levels decades before scholars noted the patterns.
When considering a woman in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, what explains her power within the drug economy, compared to women in that business today? Perhaps the fact that women on the margins of society who sought economic advancement in the illicit market, like men in the same position, enjoyed a certain level of respect if they were able to develop clientelist networks that mimicked those of more powerful members of society, whether among revolutionary generals, politicians, or criminals. What made la Chata’s power unique among women in the trade was her ability to grow her business and have it endure until her death in 1959. Significantly, la Chata, like some others in the drug business, filled a void in La Merced and beyond by performing “good works” in her community.38
Drug traffickers and dealers rely on the people who surround them. They provide food, shelter, social services, and informal banking through loans to budding drug entrepreneurs who may not be able to access such funds through legitimate means.39 La Chata recognized the fragility of power and nation during a time of crisis in Mexico, and she filled a void in her poor neighborhood by operating as a “godmother” to the people of La Merced. In the 1930s and 1940s, the economy was improving from that of the 1920s, but social services and economic structures continued to lag behind political developments. The fissures of the state and the instability of state control, whether due to revolution or the ensuing conflict, may have offered women opportunities to emerge as bosses. As history has demonstrated, in extraordinary times women take on greater nontraditional roles, such as becoming military leaders during a revolution.40 Both Anslinger and Salazar saw la Chata as an equal if not superior trafficker and dealer to Jaramillo. Although both drug warriors studied and analyzed her relationship to Jaramillo and other men in her criminal organization, they recognized her as a primary threat, as detailed in their internal memos.
Despite la Chata’s widely acknowledged ties to those in power, the police and government officials arrested and imprisoned her seven times from 1934 to 1945. Whether imprisoned in Lecumberri, Cárcel de Mujeres, or Islas Marías, she endured her prison terms in style. She maintained her own servants while in prison, including a woman who came once a month to do her hair. Similar to Pablo Escobar and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, she hosted numerous visitors to the prison, many of whom came to ask for favors. Like any other “godfather,” she offered advice and assistance to those in need. As with other prisoners on Islas Marías, la Chata’s daughters visited her for extended periods of time. However, she was reported to have built a hotel and an airplane runway on one of the penal colony’s islands, so her daughters would find their visits easy and comfortable.41
In 1957, police arrested Lola la Chata for the last time at the age of fifty as she was processing heroin in her home.42 Described in the press as a “famous international narcotic trafficker,” she had been captured after eluding police for two years. Her elusion necessitated that she live under heavy guard in her home, in some ways similar to El Chapo Guzmán. The early-morning raid captured her and her “cohort Luis Oaxaca Jaramillo,” as well as ten servants described as her agents. In the search of her mansion, investigators found twenty-nine million pesos in cash ($9,000; 2012: $73,600), expensive jewelry, and equipment for drug processing, as well as firearms and ammunition.
In an interview with the press while in jail, la Chata made one statement: “Yes, I’ll talk, but first question all the police agencies. . . . All they wanted to do was arrest me and get me out of the way. However, don’t implicate any more innocent people. I am the only responsible one for [the] narcotics traffic and business that I established.”43 Accepting full responsibility, she made a strategic—if not honorable—move, disassociating her deputies and agents from her crimes. Protecting those men, whose responsibility had been to protect her, she challenged bourgeois concepts of the patriarchal family in which the men dominated and protected the women.44 Her statements to the press confirmed that she was the boss of the organization, not her husband or the other men associated with her. She did not hide behind the men of the organization; instead, she was openly public about her power. There is also an important criminal aspect to her assertion. She most likely hoped that some of her associates would not be sentenced to jail so that they could continue the business.
La Chata routinely broke with prevailing gendered norms; however, she was a product of a violent society in transition. She transgressed physical space within Mexico City and throughout the country. Although there is little evidence to suggest that she crossed into the United States, her heroin did cross borders. She moved beyond the dictates of gender that present organized crime in the 1940s and 1950s as a masculine endeavor. Instead, she established that the shadowy world of the informal market offered women viable options and public recognition, whether welcomed or not. After being found guilty and sent back to Cárcel de Mujeres, la Chata died in September 1959 of coronary failure. It was rumored that she had died of a heroin overdose, but her admirers acknowledged that she had ongoing heart problems. Despite her arrests and imprisonments, an estimated five hundred people attended her funeral, over one-third of whom were rumored to be police.
WOMEN BOSSES AND FAMILY TIES
La Chata’s success came during a time when officials in the United States and Mexico were becoming increasingly worried about the impact of narcotics on national goals, and on the dangers of narcotics, specifically behaviors such as sexual lasciviousness that such substances allegedly caused. La Chata’s drug empire stretched from Mexico to Canada. Her reach exceeded those of many other narcotics smugglers, and her power and networks proved effective in combating those who fought to undermine her.
What is striking about la Chata is that she was not the only woman in North America who led a transnational trafficking family in the 1930s and 1940s. Women worked alongside their husbands and lovers to sell and distribute drugs. As Anslinger tried to battle women such as la Chata, he also sought to undermine women in the United States who created crime families. In Texas, the Beland family had been a concern for local Fort Worth officials and federal treasury agents since the 1920s.45
Joe H. Beland and Lucy Beland headed the drug trafficking clan. Joe was a machinist who worked for the railroad until his death in 1925; he and Lucy had six children.46 Born in 1871 in Georgia, Lucy Beland headed a crime family of “thieves, robbers, burglars, and drug addicts” who began to appear in documents in the early 1910s.47 Joe Beland frequently was portrayed as the poor, suffering husband who endured his wife’s eccentricities and criminality, which she passed on to their children. After Joe’s death in 1925, it was alleged that Lucy worked with her children Charlie, Joe Henry, Annice Beland Hamilton, and Willie, along with their wives and husbands. Their drug operation grew in the 1930s and 1940s, and they distributed and sold heroin, both Asian and Mexican. Like la Chata, they created cross-class alliances that spread across the United States. They had connections to Jewish and Italian organized crime that sold their heroin in the major cities.48
Figure 13. Leavenworth mug shot of Charles Beland. Record Group 129, National Archives at Kansas City.
Initially, the Belands appeared to be a family tormented by problems and tragedies. In 1911, the eldest son, Cha
rlie, eleven years old at the time, appeared in newspapers for the first time when he stabbed his thirteen-year-old playmate and was put on probation. After that, his sister Willie was repeatedly arrested for shoplifting, first dresses from local dry goods stores and later silk kimonos. After her first arrest at the age of fifteen, she was described as a “stunningly pretty girl” who refused to talk to police officers. When questioned about one particular dress that she stole, she simply remarked that it was pretty.49
By 1921, Charlie Beland was serving a sentence in Fort Leavenworth for violation of the Harrison Act. Charlie and his younger brother Joe both did time in Leavenworth for narcotics charges.50 Charlie’s mother Lucy and his siblings were arrested twice in a period of three weeks for selling narcotics, even though they had attempted to avoid arrest by stashing a can of opium with some hens they kept.51 Willie Beland told a journalist that only her father and one married older brother, George, had avoided morphine addiction. Willie blamed schoolyard drug pushers for her family’s use of morphine, which had landed her brother Charlie in jail and her sister Cora (also referred to as Coral) in the morgue. Willie argued that her sister died from an unsupervised morphine withdrawal after she was arrested.52 Cora died in 1917, at the age of eighteen.53 In her prison interview in 1921, Willie argued that her and her sisters’ addiction contributed to the entire family becoming addicts, due to the affordability of morphine, which she claimed cost only twenty-five cents for a large bottle. In defending herself in court, she declared that morphine addiction was a horrible torture to which most of her siblings had succumbed.
In 1936, the family reached prominence as drug traffickers due to the arrest of their primary competitors, the Ginsberg-Kayne-Gordon faction, which was also based in Texas. Anslinger’s FBN destroyed the organization, allowing the Belands to simply take over their transnational trafficking business.54
The Beland family presented a classic case of recidivism. Lucy served her first prison sentence in 1921 but returned to jail in 1926 and 1938. Charlie was sentenced for violation of the Harrison Act in 1920, 1926, 1934, 1940, and 1942. Joe Henry, too, racked up convictions in 1926, 1934, 1938, and 1947.55 Willie Beland James had numerous arrests from 1931 to 1947. Many times she received probation only to be rearrested on another narcotics violation. The reason for this was that the criminal sentencing of women involved in narcotics was far lighter than that of men. The wives of Charlie and Joe Henry, Esther and Jacqueline, respectively, had numerous arrests as well. The husbands of Annice and Willie worked closely with their wives, and they too were arrested and violated their paroles. The Belands, like la Chata, also maintained legitimate businesses that covered up their trafficking. Charlie Beland reported to prison authorities in 1951 that he had a trucking company, and approximately $20,000 (2012: $177,000) in property and investments.56 By the 1950s, a granddaughter was operating package stores in Texas; she, too, remained under suspicion of drug trafficking, and the names of various Beland offspring continued to appear in congressional hearings.57
In the few U.S. sources that mention Lucy Beland, she is a sensationalized criminal who hooked her children to ensure that she maintained control over them. This appears unlikely from the documents. When her eldest, Charlie, was first arrested, he was viewed as the mastermind of the criminal family. In interviews, Lucy’s children claimed that she never used.58 They argued that she became involved in the drug trade due to their own addictions and that because of their addictions she began to sell drugs. After her husband’s death in 1925, it is possible that she turned to selling drugs to supplement her income, particularly during the economic depression of the 1930s.
Figure 14. Leavenworth mug shot of Joe Beland. Record Group 129, National Archives at Kansas City.
The Belands would be intimately involved in drug trafficking. Charlie’s arrests in the 1940s revealed that he traveled to New York for the purpose of acquiring heroin, yet he also appeared to have sources closer to home. He and Joe would live their lives in and out of prison. Charlie Beland died on November 26, 1955, in Alcatraz, at the age of fifty-five. He had been moved from Leavenworth to Alcatraz due to his drug smuggling in prison.59 In his prison record, he told officials that he mainlined heroin and got hooked because “he was a wild and crazy kid.”60 At the time of his death, he had been in prison since 1944 on a narcotics charge. Lucy Beland died on December 30, 1952, at home in the same small town outside Fort Worth where she had lived most of her life. At the time of her death, two of her sons were imprisoned and two of her children were dead.
It is difficult to ascertain if some of the heroin that the Belands distributed came from Lola la Chata. Their location in Fort Worth places them on a direct transportation line, the eastern Pan-American Highway, sometimes referred to as the Inter-American Highway, which stretches from Mexico City to Pachuca to Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo to San Antonio to Fort Worth, in Texas the I-35 interstate corridor.61 What officials learned about Charlie Beland while he was at Alcatraz was that he had contacts with Mexican organized crime for the purpose of acquiring illegal drugs.62
In the 1940s, la Chata gained greater and greater recognition as her ties to this transportation route became more evident. In 1944, S. J. Kennedy, treasury representative in charge, requested information from Mexican officials about narcotics smugglers operating in Mexico. Mexican authorities informed Kennedy about one of la Chata’s illegal laboratories, which highlighted her connections to powerful men and the reach of her trafficking in Mexico and beyond. The lab operated in the basement of the Hotel Imperial in the northern industrial city of Monterrey. La Chata, Jaramillo, and Enrique Escudero Romano, all successful traffickers, held interest in the lab, but so too did Gastón Vaca Cordella, the former chief of the sanitary police and a local politician.63
La Chata was not unique in operating laboratories and working closely with men. Mexican and U.S. officials documented other women from both countries involved in processing. For example, in 1949 U.S. and Mexican officials arrested Carmen Nuñez Reza along with her accomplice Juan Valdés Ham in Guadalajara. Despite the co-occupancy of Valdés Ham, Nuñez Reza held the property rights to the house where they were arrested processing heroin.64 Women involved in processing heroin who owned the houses or establishments where they were arrested were also found in Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Tijuana.
La Chata’s partnership with Gastón Vaca Cordella, the former chief of the sanitary police serves as another example of the collusion of civil authorities and civic and state leaders in drug trafficking. Vaca Cordella had been the chief narcotics agents for the city of Monterrey. His corruption and that of other federal agents charged with policing drug use and distribution continues to draw attention.65 From the evidence, la Chata had labs not only in Mexico City but also in other Mexican cities. This demonstrates a series of overlapping networks across the country and into the border region that served to move heroin from different locals in Mexico into the United States. Moreover, la Chata’s power coincided with more frequent investigations of governors and ex-governors as subjects in the smuggling and production of drugs.
Ávila Camacho’s presidential decree demanding the arrest of drug traffickers triggered a North American search for fugitives María Dolores Estévez Zuleta and Enrique Escudero Romano. On June 16, 1945, the Mexican government sent a cable to the U.S. and Canadian governments asking for assistance in capturing the fugitives. Under separate cover, they sent photographs and fingerprints.66 Unlike the newspaper snapshots of la Chata, María Dolores Estévez, in the photos provided by the Mexican government, appeared with her face completely uncovered and without sunglasses. She looked youthful, her hair curling around her forehead and with ornate gold earrings. Escudero appeared in a summer suit with his head slightly cocked to one side.
Figure 15. Mug shots of María Dolores Estévez Zuleta and Enrique Escudero Romano, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, Freedom of Information / Privac
y Act request 1150736-001.
Anslinger wrote to the chief of the Canadian Narcotics Division, Colonel C. H. L. Sharman, about the case against la Chata.67 Anslinger told Sharman that arrest warrants had been issued for la Chata and Escudero, and they were known to be traveling and transporting heroin to Canada in either a 1942 Cadillac Sedanette, a 1938 Dodge, or a 1942 blue and gray Sedanette.68 Over the next three weeks, INS agents in various cities including Los Angeles, El Paso, San Antonio, and Philadelphia searched for the fugitives. A Puerto Rican informant who had been in Laredo and El Paso told U.S. officials that the wanted pair had been in Ciudad Juárez and had crossed the border into El Paso en route to Canada.69 The informant had worked for Mexican Secret Service agents in Monterrey who had been trying to arrest la Chata and Escudero. The State Department civil attaché told police agents that both should be considered dangerous.