The Original, Much-Maligned Narco Mum
Lola La Chata was Mexico's first major female narcotics trafficker. She was also a mother and a daughter who created a criminal matriarchy.
MEXICO CITY - Mexico’s “Public enemy number one” in 1945 was the woman pictured above. Her name was María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, but she is better known today as Lola La Chata. She was an enemy of the public because she was the most powerful drug trafficker of her time. She was also a daughter, and a mother.
Her detractors, such as Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (it would become the DEA), referred to her “as short and fat (180 pounds) with “Negroid” complexion and features, and gold capped teeth.” Her admirers, who included Mexico’s Chief of Narcotics at the Department of Health Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra as well as the American writer William Boroughs, found her “beautiful”, fascinating and inspiring.
Lola was the first threat of her kind in Mexican history. She rose from being a street drug peddler to a transnational narcotics trafficker in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. She was married to another known drug boss, Enrique Jaramillo, but according to historian Elaine Carey, Lola was the higher achiever.
“La Chata’s own ability…was what made her unique compared to other women in the trade. Her relationship with Jaramillo contributed to her business, but both Mexican and U.S. authorities regarded her as an equal, if not superior, trafficker and dealer compared to her husband,” writes Carey.
Whether you consider this badassery is your call. I consider it an achievement. Feel free to disagree with me in the comments section but read me out before you do
Lola, who was born in 1906, started off in the business when she was a child, running weed and dope for her mother in La Merced, Mexico City’s central market. Yup - it was her mother who got her into the narco world.
At the time that Lola was growing up, the production and use of drugs such as opium was restricted, thanks to the Harrison Act in the United States. As the illicit market for drugs boomed, it created a business opportunity that was too good to miss for her mum, who moved from selling fried pork skin chicharrones and coffee, to marijuana cigarettes and opium. And Lola became her delivery girl. For brown, working class girls like her and her mother before her, lucrative opportunities rarely knocked. Not of the legal kind, anyway.
As Lola grew, she spent some time in Ciudad Juarez, on the border with the U.S, learning the smuggling and production trade, before moving back to the capital to start her own market stall, chronicles Carey, which was the beginning of a huge and successful business that would stretch across the U.S and even Canada. And as her trafficking empire grew, Lola had two daughters - Dolores and Maria Louisa - who she brought into the business, creating a criminal matriarchy.
Having spent the last week writing about the history of women in Latin American organized crime, I’ve been really struck by the importance of women’s relationships with other women in the criminal underworld. I’ve also been amazed by how little we are aware of those dynamics in their stories. History and story-telling has tended to focus on the relationships women had with other men - lovers, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers - and how that influenced their criminal trajectories. But on closer inspection, matriarchies like that created by Lola seem to have repeated themselves throughout history, and women’s relationships with other women seem as fundamental as the connections they have to men.
When trafficker Ignacia Jasso, who became known as La Nacha and was Lola la Chata’s contemporary, was incarcerated in Mexico, her daughters helped her husband run her drug business whilst she was inside.
Colombian Griselda Blanco, one of the most famous female drug traffickers of all time, surrounded herself with educated, middle-class women to further her criminal empire - women who eventually proved to be key witnesses in the criminal case against her. Most of the women I have investigated for Las Patronas had children, most of them bought those children into the business. They also had female networks that were fundamental in making their businesses work.
A few months ago, I interviewed a female weapons trafficker in Tepito, here in Mexico City. Let’s call her Isabel. She told me she first started making trips to the border to pick up weapons trafficked in from the U.S because her mother - the boss - was ill. And Isabel is today grooming her 16-year-old daughter to come into the weapons trafficking trade, which serves the cartels and private residents.
Esmeralda Aravel Flores Acosta, known as the Black Widow in El Salvador, worked with her sisters to create a human trafficking enterprise that forced other women to marry men who she and her compadres (which also included the MS-13 street gang) killed for their life insurance payments.
I could go on, but my point is if we don’t know much about the relationships that female traffickers have with their mothers and sisters and girlfriends and how that influences their criminal organizations, it’s probably because we’re not asking the right questions.
The other thing that I wondered is whether the combination of motherhood with trafficking is just too abhorrent for society to confront. It offends us so much and our fundamental belief in the goodness of mothers that it remains invisible and undiscussed. I touched on this issue briefly on IG a few weeks ago in relation to the “Lost Daughter” movie on Netflix and the taboos of mothers behaving in what is deemed to be an unmotherly fashion, and was reminded of it again as I dug into history.
Enedina Arellano Felix, who led the Tijuana Cartel following the arrest of her brothers in the early 2000s, was often called La Narcomami - a moniker focused on the fact that she was a [bad] momma. I’ve never seen the term Narcopapi used to describe a man in the drug business. I’ve never seen the wisdom of El Chapo bringing his sons into the fray of the Sinaloa Cartel questioned (they’re known as Los Chapitos). His qualities as a father are simply not part of his drug trafficking legend.
Much like in the real world, Narcomamis tend to shoulder the work of parenting more than Narcopapis, especially in a region where single-mum families are so ubiquitous. And let’s face it, for a man to be a “good” father, he doesn’t have to work as hard or do as much as a woman needs to do to be a “good” mother.
It may seem like I’m generalizing, but I do so with the confidence of a mother with experience. I have a great baby daddy. The kids adore him. He has them around half of the time. The performance of his gender in that field is generally so dismal that he shines when he fulfills his fatherly duties.
Conversely, the confines of being a “good” mother are so tight that it’s easy to put a foot wrong and spill into bad mum territory.
“I remember speaking to women in their early 20s, they were all mothers. They had to earn an income. They were also part of a gang or worked for one. But they have to juggle those identities. In a way that most of the guys don’t,” Mo Hume at Glasgow University said to me in relation to Central America’s gangs.
I refer you to last week’s newsletter for a few examples of this double-standard and judging. To waver or stray from one’s motherly duties is to question women’s very nature. To be a mother who commits crimes? The very end of the bad end of the scale.
It may sound obvious to say that women have to balance their gender-enforced duties and responsibilities with their criminal identities. But I think this is often forgotten when we look at organized crime. It’s worth reiterating that it’s a business that in many ways works like any other legal enterprise, with its own cultures and pressures and limits and requirements for success. Other mundane dynamics, such as the fact that so many incarcerated gangsters are male, places more pressure on women on the outside to balance mothering with earning an income alone.
And to actually achieve any success or status in organized crime - much like in the legal world - when you have children is, I’d argue, an achievement in itself. Pile onto that the additional stresses that avoiding the law brings, and you get extra brownie points.
If we leave aside the moral judgements that are especially reserved for women, then those mothers who DO make it are doing so against higher odds. That might not deserve admiration, but it does deserve respect.