How the Narco Gender Gap Makes Women Work For Notoriety
Most women stray from the female script,but what about those girls who have completely walked off the stage?
MEXICO CITY - Around a decade ago, I was reporting a story about missing people in the humid, southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Clandestine graves were being unearthed by civilian search parties with unnerving frequency. They contained the putrid, dismembered body parts of men, women and youths who had been reported desaparecido. “Disappeared.”
Drug-related violence was raging in that part of Mexico as a myriad of different crime gangs fought it out for the lucrative heroin and weed produced by clandestine gardens and labs in the green mountains for transportation and sale in the U.S. The disappeared were part of the collateral damage of that ongoing feud.
As we prepared to hike up a hill to stand around one of said graves, a man from the local human rights commission looked at me with unveiled disgust.
“You’re going up the hill like THAT?” he said.
I thought he was talking about my inappropriate footwear - crappy walking boots of which one of the soles was coming away - so I shrugged sheepishly.
“No! With that belly!” he almost shouted, making an angry and exasperated gesture with his hands. I was around seven-months pregnant at the time. Lumbering. But trooping on.
I gave less than zero fucks what he thought, equal to the time that a male journalist told me as I was filming, still pregnant, during a conference in Cabo that if I was HIS wife, I’d be at home right now. “Boy, I’m so sorry I’m not your wife,” I don’t remember thinking. Ever.
Unsolicited opinions over the years, mostly from guys, about what I choose to do and say have failed to change my behaviour in the way that they intended. But those sad little mutterings have served to fuel my fascination with women who don’t stick to the script - a script which is still incredibly easy to deviate from, despite all of our gender gains over the last couple of centuries. That fascination has mutated into obsession with perhaps the most extreme of these deviant women: those who dare to commit crimes or traffic drugs.
Women who are “delinquent” at best and narco bosses at worst are a “threat to civilization” because they violate social expectations of mother, carer, nest-builder. Criminal intent is gendered, it seems. Worse still, such acts can bring women who are restricted by their class and race both power and wealth, says Elaine Carey, a historian and academic who wrote a book about women in the drug trade. Power and wealth for women? Whatever next?
Enter “Las Patronas,” a word in Spanish which means female bosses and has been used as a catch-all term used across Latin America to describe all women crime directors in the last couple of decades. Only men seem to deserve their own unique monikers or nicknames. Pablo Escobar is Escobar. Joaquín Guzmán is “el Chapo” (Shorty). Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, head of the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG is its Spanish acronym) is “el Mencho.” I could go on.
But all of my gals - from Chapo’s top money-launderer and highest-ranking woman in the Sinaloa Cartel, to a deadly political wannabe on the Guatemalan / El Salvador border - were nicknamed La Patrona by law-enforcement and the media when they were in the spotlight.
Deeply unimaginative, and downright rude. Give a girl her own name, for crying out loud. They’ve earned their notoriety.
Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, now in her 60s, spent most of her life in the drug trade, and the lion’s share of her career working with El Chapo’s son. Sebastiana Cottón Vásquez (pictured below) used to run things on the Guatemalan border with Mexico, working with the Sinaloa Cartel and other crime syndicates in the region to move dope across the border. Marixa Lemus Pérez saw her sister massacred when she was eating lunch, and developed her own homicidal tendencies. Marllory Chacón Rossell was “one of the most prolific narcotics traffickers in Central America,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department, and moved millions of dollars around the region for her narco clients.
Photo: Sebastiana Cottón was once one of the most feared drug-trafficking plaza bosses in Guatemala. Credit: United States Government.
Most of the women we’ve heard of in organised crime were violent, because violence is what most catches our attention in the crime world. My current thinking - thanks in part to an enlightening conversation with the brilliant Mo Hume at Glasgow University - is that violence is the male manifestation of power in criminal organisations and tends to be used as the main metric for measuring dominance and strength regardless of gender. (I said my current thinking. I reserve my right to change my mind about that).
But what if not all women who move in the crime world are violent? They are even more invisible than their brutal female role models in the trade, that’s what.
I’m not a believer in binaries. Victim or victimizer. Powerful or powerless. Protected or vulnerable. Agency vs coercion. Even right or wrong is subjective. What I do believe is that the majority of women who get involved with the gangs or cartels in Latin America rarely escape sexual violence. (Hell, few women in the world escape sexual violence or aggression completely, but in the case of these women that threat is almost a guarantee). Many are running from it at home, others have to negotiate it as a condition of working for criminal syndicates. Some join as a way of avoiding violence and earning protection from respected men, the most basic of survival techniques.
But all women have agency, and we are often robbed of it by many analyses of our role in criminal organisations. The array of options available to each woman vary enormously, but they are there and in need of examination. We don’t have to have a gun to our heads to do bad things.
The point of Las Patronas - which has seen life as a VICE World News series but is in the process of becoming a book - is to try and shine a light on as many of the women in the ranks of organised crime as I can find, not just the violent powerhouses. I’m trying to show how power manifests when looked at through a woman’s eyes. Women in crime move in different spaces, and work in different ways, and this fascinates me.
If it fascinates you too, then you’re in the right place, and should stay tuned.
Can't wait to dig in! It's fascinating to learn about the nuance of roles when we tend to be fed that there's only one — gangster's moll.