by Elaine Carey
These cases of contemporary women traffickers demonstrate a continuation of women’s involvement in the drug trade as it changed over time. In the twentieth century, women intersected with the complexity of those changes that were marked by the introduction of new forms of technology, global flows of people, innovation in banking and communications, and continuous demand for new, and cheaper, drugs. León reinforces the image of the local dealer as Mexican and a foreign menace operating inside the United States. She is portrayed as a contagion that must be removed to protect society.
Media depictions of León are similar to those of Ignacia Jasso, la viuda de González, la Nacha, whose drug trafficking activities directly on the border ensured that she held the attention of U.S. lawmakers for over fifty years. Harry Anslinger used her and María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, “Lola la Chata,” as examples with which to threaten the Mexican government and demand greater border control. Seventy years later, León’s tale serves to justify stricter immigration laws and border enforcement in a time of a crescendo of anti-immigrant sentiment. And yet, this same society that views itself as a victim has increasingly demanded León’s products, just as it desired those of la Nacha and la Chata. Garnica’s arrest exemplified the intersection of the policing of globalized crime and the lure of the narcolifestyle. As a customs agent posted at an international port of entry, Garnica and her corruption evolved into a cautionary tale. Despite receiving greater media attention, these women have been portrayed as gendered caricatures or appendages of more important masculine figures such as players in the Mexican Mafia, León’s adult sons, and Garnica’s cartel connections, but the truth is very different.
Figure 22. Woman in a marijuana field. Photo by José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán.
In the historiography of drugs, women still remain marginal if mentioned at all. Most works on drugs that address women focus on them as victims of drugs and addiction. I do not dispute the analysis of women as addicts, and I recognize that they do sell cocaine, narcotics, pharmaceuticals, and their bodies to support their drug habits. The connections between women and the drug trade, however, are far more complex. Thinking historically and using historical methods, I have exposed women’s long-term ties to the industry as active agents in the flow of drugs in all levels, from mule to jefa.
In this study, I have argued that most women bosses preferred to remain anonymous and on the fringes of criminality, because being on the margins allowed them to operate and generate greater profits without the disruptions of prison or greater competition. Becoming a known trafficker disrupted business with legal proceedings, imprisonment, and exile. Exposure also led to separation from family, harassment, and competition. By staying unacknowledged for most of the twentieth century, the largely anonymous women traffickers ensured their own longevity in the trade. Women such as Ignacia Jasso, María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, Ismelda Barragán, and Griselda Blanco all trafficked drugs for years.6 During their eras, police officials and politicians routinely recognized their existence and used legal and extralegal means to undermine them.
By not problematizing the role of women in the narcotics trade, scholars have undervalued women and ignored the importance of family and informal social networks that exist within drug trafficking and organized crime. The great male epic narrative, whether of the capo or the cop, is only a small part of the story. Frankly, it is rarely the metanarrative of these modern tales or histories. Indeed, the majority of women participate in the drug trade as mules, addicts, and victims. And despite the ever-increasing attention paid to capos, bosses, and godfathers, most men in the trade operate and exist in those very same roles: mule, low-level worker, addict, and victim. Exceptional women, like exceptional men, formed cross-class, cross-ethnic partnerships to build organizations to facilitate transnational illicit flows. The masses who eke out a living and die in the drug trade rarely merit articles or books. Instead, they enter into the trade, perhaps recognized only as a statistical estimate. They then leave with little formal or historical notice, except for maybe an arrest warrant, a prison record, or a death certificate.
The historical importance of mules and the centrality of couriers are essential to understanding drug flows. Maria Wendt’s arrest in 1936 triggered the collapse of one of the largest drug trafficking empires of its time. Her role as a highly skilled and educated mule portrays a completely different scenario from the common representation of the mule as a poor woman desperate to change her circumstances. What does it mean if women chose to become mules to achieve socioeconomic advancement or experience excitement rather than pursuing it for economic survival? In my work with José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán, we argued that young upper-middle-class women are drawn to the drug trade for the same reason as their male peers.7 They enjoy the quick money but also the power that they wield over other men and women who work for them. In prison interviews conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s, women reported the same type of draw: money and glamour.8 Cisneros Guzmán’s ongoing work with these women demonstrates that their interest in the trade is far more insidious than that of the poor woman who feels forced into the trade.9 These young women make a conscious decision to build an illicit business rather than a legal one.
The centrality of women in laundering money is more difficult to document but remains a historical continuity. The businesses that women started or used to cover their true professions or to assist their husbands’, fathers’, or brothers’ drug businesses must be analyzed to understand the flow of revenues. Boutiques, hair salons, nail salons, bars, and restaurants have always been businesses where women could find employment or become proprietors, since the clientele was predominantly female or female presence was welcomed. The fact that women such as Estévez, Jasso, Ismelda Galindo Barragán, Yolanda Sarmiento, and Griselda Blanco owned businesses like these demonstrates the fluidity between illicit and licit enterprises. Like immigrant men who found themselves on the margins of the economy, women used those few economic openings to create other businesses. They did not control masculine venues such as waterfronts, unions, or construction companies that frequently became associated with organized crime. Yet, female bosses, too, realized the importance of having diversified holdings, and they used these business types that were not unusual to women.
Sandra Ávila Beltrán and the women in this study demonstrate that kinship remains an important factor to their success in trafficking drugs. Ávila Beltrán described to Julio Scherer García, a prominent Mexican journalist, how she gained credentials through her relationships with powerful men.10 As defined by criminologist Howard Abadinsky, credentials are essential to building trust, protection, and profit.11 Those credentials allowed her to thrive and to create a protective circle around her. Like Ávila Beltrán, la Chata, la Nacha, Galindo Barragán, Helen Hernandez, Sarmiento, and Blanco all used their credentials with criminal organizations to promote their own legitimate businesses. Yet they, too, encountered betrayals from men in their organizations or difficulties with policing agents.
The evidence is clear that women of such families have been able to successfully launder money through their legitimate businesses. However, this ability remains largely unacknowledged because few consider the importance of women involved in finances or as partners. For example, Enedina Arellano Félix ran the Tijuana cartel once the police and DEA arrested her brothers. An accountant and businesswoman, she was always a partner in the criminal organization, and she groomed her son Luis to succeed her and her brothers, just as Ciudad Juárez drug boss Ignacia Jasso had prepared her own sons.12 Arellano’s ability to survive in the trade is the latest chapter in a Tijuana historical continuum, beginning with Ismelda Galindo Barragán in the 1950s and followed by Helen Hernandez in the 1970s, both of whom played equal roles along with male family members.
This study positions drug trafficking as an undocumented part of women’s and gender history, and it draws some conclusions about women’s political, social, and economic power in environments in whi
ch they were presumed to remain economically, socially, and politically disempowered. Instead, they partnered with men to build powerful transnational trafficking organizations from the 1910s to the present. Here, I shed light on how they intersected with the state and its policing efforts. By looking at the connections between women, their families, and transnational criminal organizations, I question contemporary accounts and studies of organized crime. The continued distortion of organized crime as an exclusive men’s club is a misreading of the historical roles and practices of women. A close reading of journalistic literature and documentary evidence reveals that women who were the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of organized crime figures did not simply sit by the stove stirring the sauce. They frequently worked as couriers, confidants, or partners.13 In examining Sarmiento and Blanco, DEA and NYPD agents recognized their power and contacts as significant.
Returning to Nancy Campbell’s assertion that drugs threaten to level the naturalized hierarchy between the sexes and the state,14 I argue that women have used the skills they gained from the informal market such as prostitution and street vending to develop business in transnational organized crime. Women employed their social networks such as family and friends to construct sophisticated organized crime entities, just as men have done whether in Chinese, Jewish, Irish, Italian, or Mexican organized crime or in biker or prison gangs. Contemporary women in the drug trade have their preferences. Some prefer to work exclusively with men while others prefer to work with women. Some rely on their children and train them to enter the trade, and some employ violence to defend their business interests against potential competitors, as Blanco did. Other women who see themselves as bosses send their children abroad to boarding school to protect them and keep them far from the business, like the iconic Michael Corleone character in The Godfather, who was supposed to be the son who followed a legitimate path to success and prosperity.
While many contemporary journalists and writers remain blind to the complexity of gender roles in crime, many others have long pursued this topic in depth. Present-day scholars—both anthropologists and criminologists—such as Tammy Anderson, Alan Block, Howard Campbell, Barbara Denton, Eloise Dunlap, Bruce Johnson, Lisa Maher, and Ric Curtis all challenge the universalizing and tautological constructs of women in the drug business as mule or victim. Their theoretical approaches and methodologies are essential to this work.
In this book, I engage their research by offering a study of the past that positions women as modern innovators, as demonstrated by their fluid responses to political, social, and economic shifts.15 For example, I consider Block’s analysis of legitimate fronts to illicit ventures undertaken by female Jewish criminals in the early 1900s when I analyze Galindo Barragán. In the 1940s and 1950s, Galindo ran a successful bordello in Tijuana where she distributed heroin. She and her husband, Big Mike, operated legitimate businesses such as boutiques, hair salons, taxi services, and a dog racing track, all of which facilitated the distribution of heroin and the laundering of money gained from supplying numerous cities in the United States.
In the case of Anderson’s analysis of multiple economic arrangements utilized by women in the drug trade, I found evidence of women in New Jersey selling heroin on commission or purchasing franchises to sell it from organized crime entities beginning in the 1920s. Along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders, evidence from the 1930s suggests that women traffickers and suppliers also sold franchises to female dealers in major cities.
To ignore masculinity, though, is intellectually perilous. After all, men have done most of the policing, diplomacy, and governing as well as trafficking. In some ways, this situation has contributed to women remaining bit characters in a great masculine epic. In doing this work, I built upon Hermann Herlinghaus’s theory regarding narconarratives. He argues that these narratives designate a multiplicity of dramas expressed in antagonistic language and articulated along the border through fantasies that revolve around the depravity and deterritorialization of individual and communitarian life.16 I employed Herlinghaus’s construct of the narconarratives in some of its complexities and mediums to demonstrate historical continuities and contingencies that both men and women experienced. For example, treasury agent Alvin Scharff demonstrates the antagonism that exists along borders and frontiers. His criminal tendencies made him a successful agent because he easily moved between the two worlds, just as drug bosses do. He was in many ways a classic American man’s man. He embraced the freedom of the frontier and moved between the illicit and the licit with a skill that rivaled that of most of his fellow agents. Despite his antagonism with Harry Anslinger, he persevered, but he never could quite capitalize on his fame as he attempted to dramatize his life by working with fictional Western writer Garland Roark.17
Scharff’s and Maria Wendt’s cases demonstrate that the massive displacement of people during the interwar years led certain professional men to build a successful four-continent criminal network. War, displacement, access to heroin, and the changing technologies of the twentieth century contributed to the rise of the Loeffelholz-Branstatter organization. Although the 1930s gave rise to a sensationalized drug problem, similar to the problem prompting the present-day drug war, Herlinghaus’s analysis offers a means to depart from hypermasculine journalistic accounts of violence—considered “expert”—by seeking out and analyzing other forms of evidence to develop knowledge that engages the symbolic and metaphorical transfer of information about everyday life and change over time. By mining sources and piecing together the histories of diverse criminal organizations from an array of archives, I was able to establish the flows between illicit and licit business, and where and how men and women connected to those enterprises.
In the Americas, as in much of the world, the informal and illicit economy has long flourished and has been tolerated as a form of social safety net to replace or supplement those services offered only inadequately by the government, the Church, or other legitimate organizations. Those unique economic structures combined with the incomplete democratic reforms implemented in Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico in the twentieth century. In Mexico, the breakdown of the gentleman’s agreement between the drug traffickers and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) ensured that Mexico regained centrality in the narconarratives.
Narconarratives coexist in sites, and times, of violence, but these are also sites of profit, legitimate business, and even socioeconomic advancement for those on the margins. For example, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) recently issued a public apology for laundering money for drug cartels.18 A skeptical historian realizes that other legitimate businesses must also be involved. These narratives have long been “open secrets,” a cultural dynamic in which much is known but little publicly acknowledged except at certain times for economic, social, or political reasons.19 For years, drugs have—borrowing Avery Gordon’s words—“haunted North America[,] exhibiting a seething presence, acting on and meddling with the taken for granted realities.” It is exactly this type of haunting in Mexico that led sociologist Luis Astorga, writer Élmer Mendoza, and artist Lenin Márquez, all Sinaloans, to take on the muse of drugs and violence in their work.20 As skeptical observers, they too wondered why their daily lives, and those of their fellow Sinaloans, were not studied, depicted, or recognized. These were not ethereal speculations but rather unique realities that spilled across state and national boundaries.
The war on drugs, whether one places its beginning in the 1930s with the formation of the FBN in the United States (intended to both coordinate with and apply pressure on the Mexican government), with Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and the formation DEA, or with the expansion of that war under Ronald Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, has a long history on both sides of the border that emerges in certain periods of time, during acute power struggles between policing agents and drug traffickers. We are currently in one of these periods of time. In Mexico, the assassinations
did not begin with former Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s 2006 declaration of a drug war. However, the growing numbers of the dead finally captured public attention as those numbers increased every year to horrific levels. The century-old open secret finally grabbed our attention. As I discuss, the issue had risen to prominence earlier, only to fade from our collective memory.
As in the past, narcos have always been as adept as the police in using the tools of technology to further their work. Before the Harrison Act, people celebrated cocaine, morphine, heroin, and marijuana as modern medical miracles that were widely embraced by health practitioners, governments, and industry.21 With illegality, things changed. Michael Kenney documented that contemporary drug traffickers have always maintained nimble organizations that easily respond to technological, criminological, cultural, and market shifts far more quickly than bureaucracies.22 This is evident from the 1910s, immediately following the Harrison Act, and into the 1920s and 1930s. Trafficking organizations readily adopted new tools in banking, the use of airplanes, and early telecommunications, as evidenced by the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter crime organization, which first realized the meaning of the globalization of narcotics trafficking in the 1930s and which also left a heap of corpses in its wake. Traffickers such as François Chiappe, Yolanda Sarmiento, Alberto Bravo, and Griselda Blanco repeated the sophistication of Loeffelholz-Brandstatter forty years later. All four of these traffickers and their organizations yielded narconarratives that had a profound effect on contemporary popular and political culture.