Women in a Men’s World? Nope. Sisters Are Doing Crime Themselves.
In honor of International Women's Day, a lucid rant on why women in crime matter more than ever.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — She told me her name was Brenda. When I met her a year ago, she had been in the Pavón prison on the outskirts of Guatemala City for 20 years. She had, technically, a further 30 years left to serve.
Brenda told me that when she was in her early 30s, she was married to a drug trafficker named Sergio. When he was killed, his former colleagues approached her with a new criminal enterprise idea: a kidnapping ring.
“I was curious about how things were done,” she said.
“I wanted to know how it felt. I wanted to feel that my life was at risk. I liked the danger.”
It was one of the most novel things I had heard reporting on women in crime up until that moment. It was refreshing to me that a woman would admit that she wanted some skin in the criminal game. That no one forced her to do it. That she didn’t resort to kidnapping because she felt she’d no other option to make cash to feed her kids – she told me herself that she wasn’t really in need of cash thanks to her (dead) narco husband.
Even so, Brenda, who is now 54, downplayed her role in the criminal enterprise. But it turns out that she was big time. After leaving the prison that day, I did some research into her and the gang she ran. It was eventually taken down by the U.S.’s FBI after it asked for $25,000 for the release of a female American hostage.
One of Brenda’s fellow inmates in Pavón also spoke to me. Her story was very different. Gloria, age 46, told me that one day a man brought an elderly woman to her house, where she rented out rooms. He paid for a room for the woman, whom he said was his mother-in-law, and asked Gloria to look after her, which she dutifully did, she said. She fed and bathed the woman, who never took off the blindfold she was wearing: Her “son-in-law” told Gloria that the woman had recently undergone eye surgery.
Within days, the police came knocking. They rescued the woman who turned out to be a hostage, and accused Gloria of kidnapping.
“I used to bathe her and feed her, but she never told me anything because she thought I was one of them,” said Gloria, who claims she had no idea her guest was a kidnapped captive.
I was stunned by her naivety.
The involvement of women in crime is never just one of these two binaries: victim or victimizer. Protagonist or minor character. Asking whether they can be bosses equal to the Chapos or Escobars is part of this study, but it is not the question at its center. On International Women’s Day this week, I was thinking about how even the roles and structures of crime are defined by the positions that men hold and the actions they take. Womens’ ascent is analysed or rated in the context of how high they rise in those existing structures.
But we only see half of the picture when we look at existing studies of organized crime because they are mostly created by men and focused on men, Dr. Felia Allum, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath who has extensively researched women in the Italian mafia, told me months back.
What if we came at it from a different, gender-based perspective that prioritized or at least equalized the importance of the position of women – not in terms of rank and file but in terms of our overall understanding of the way crime works?
A gang specialist in El Salvador recently told me that if the MS-13 gang was a car, its internal engine would be male but nearly the entire rest of the car was made up of women. Women who aren’t considered official gang members. They are the women delivering extortion threats, collecting extortion money, packing, and selling drugs, taking cash into prisons to gang members there. I could go on. We see the gang largely through the lens of violence – that element is what seems to win the attention of general audiences and policy makers – but it is so much more than that. Women very often take leadership in the financial side of organized crime, and as gangs across Central America launder their extortion proceeds by buying into legitimate businesses, I’d wager that women are deeply involved. Arguably, the process of building legal businesses gives the gangs even more social and political capital as they become employers and business owners, not just killers and racketeers. Yet we know so little about this.
The gang would look very different if we knew more about women’s’ role – and maybe policies in trying to understand them would start to look different too. Given most crime policies are geared largely at male offenders, and yet affect women too, maybe more gender-focused policies might be more – shock horror – effective?
Some of my investigations show that there are structures created by women that rely on men for violence or muscle - such as the Black Widow of El Salvador - but crack their own schemes and use their own methods of pursuasion. Without looking at women in crime outside of just their relationships to men, we are only scraping the surface of their role in the criminal underworld and how they work and influence. Their power is not always manifest in the same way as mens’, and this is largely missed.
One of the tensions I constantly confront in this project is that of recognizing the criminal climbs of women without celebrating them. Brenda told me: “I think that most of us here know what we were doing. I’ve never blamed anyone but myself. I am the owner of my bad acts.”
Which spoke to me, because in my eyes the view that criminal intent is gendered, or that women must be coopted to do bad things, is to underestimate us. Is to think that we’re simply not capable.
“There is definitely a problem with how we on the outside perceive and see this world. We have our own perspectives, and it’s a huge mistake,” said Otto Argueta Ramirez, a researcher on gender, crime, and the street gangs of Central America. “I am convinced that [our lack of understanding of women in crime] has a lot to do with the perspective of those who are investigating.”
I’m loathe to demand people think badly of women, but I do think the idea that women cannot be bad or violent or criminally successful needs to be dispelled. It is an idea that we whisper to ourselves to make us feel better about society, and life, and our reliance on women as carers and nurturers.
But it is not so.
This article is an updated adaptation of the introduction to the Patronas series, written for VICE.