This Narca Pleaded Guilty, But Got 33 Years Behind Bars. Was She the Last Big Fish of Her Generation?
Julia Martha Lorenzana-Cordon was handed down a massive sentence earlier this month, but my source said she wasn’t as bad as the men in her trafficking mafia.
The first time and last time that I visited the city of Zacapa, Guatemala, my team and I were sitting in our car in traffic when there came a hard and constant beeping from behind. Turning to look out of the back window, I saw a heavy black truck behind us.
The driver was honking the horn so aggressively that the cars started scrambling to get out of the way. That wasn’t the only motivator. There were two men sitting in the open back of the truck holding long black automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests. They looked agitated and restless in the hot sun. Neither of them wore uniforms. The truck was not a police truck.
As the cars, including ours, parted to let them through, my local contact leaned in and said quietly: “That’s them. They’re the law around here.”
It was March 2021, and I was in town doing research for my book. I was retracing the steps of a couple of women who worked with the Sinaloa Cartel trafficking drugs through the nearby border with Honduras north to Mexico and the US beyond. Zacapa is a 90 minute drive from Guatemala’s shared line with Honduras, one of the world’s most lawless borders. Dozens of tons of cocaine are smuggled from Honduras into Guatemala every year in that part of the world, as well as weapons that help bend the rest of the world to the will of organized crime.
As a journalist asking questions about the de facto “law” in this trafficking town, I didn’t need to be told I was not welcome.
Just weeks after my visit, the likely boss of the armed men in the honking truck - a woman called Julia Martha Lorenzana-Cordon - was arrested nearby in the town of Usumatlan. I was horrified when I read about it in the press, because Yuli (as she was known locally, a Spanish pronunciation of Julie) wasn’t anywhere on my radar, or that of my local contacts. Had I completely missed her? I scoured the coverage of her detention, which showed her sitting in a police truck wearing shorts, clutching a bottle of water between her long white fingernails. She looked relaxed for someone who had just been arrested, and there were some shots of her standing outside the police truck with her hands on her hips, smiling and chatting.
She may not be smiling anymore.
After nearly three years in U.S custody, Yuli, now 47, was sentenced to a massive 33 years behind bars earlier this month for the trafficking empire she ran out of Zacapa, moving dope to Mexico with the Sinaloa Cartel, on its way to its final destination in the US.
But was she the brutal trafficking matriarch such a long sentence suggests, or has she been misunderstood by American law enforcement?
Yuli is the last of her generation of the Lorenzana trafficking mafia that has dominated the cocaine business in that part of Guatemala for the last two decades. She doesn’t appear on the US Treasury department chart of her family’s trafficking organization. Her sentence suggests she should.
Her siblings, Eliu Elixander Lorenzana-Cordon and Waldemar Lorenzana-Cordon, were convicted on international narcotics trafficking charges in March 2019. Both of them, who I featured in my book because they did business with a number of the women I profiled, eventually received life sentences. Her father, Waldemar Lorenzana-Lima Sr., known locally as “the Patriarch”, pleaded guilty to international narcotics trafficking charges in August 2014 and was sentenced to 23 years - ten less than his daughter. He died in prison.
What’s particularly unusual about Yuli’s sentence is that it came despite the fact that she pleaded guilty, like so many of the other women I profiled in “NARCAS.” In the majority of cases, that amounts to a lower sentence as women help prosecutors build cases against other protagonists in the region, often even bigger fish, often male, to reduce their own sentences.
But maybe Yuli was, in the end, the biggest fish left.
The mother of three was extradited to the US on December 10, 2021 along with her older brother Haroldo. A few months after that, one of her sons, 26-year-old Hans Broiner Lemus Lorenzana, was gunned “by unidentified assailants” at a restaurant in the eastern Zacapa province. Police found more than 80 bullet casings at the scene, according to press coverage, and two of his bodyguards were also killed.
“Lemus Lorenzana’s criminal past is murky,” reported InSight Crime at the time. “He had not faced any drug trafficking charges prior to his assassination.” Federal authorities said the Attorney General’s Office has no record of his prior detention for drug trafficking. Local press reports suggest he was arrested in June 2013 while allegedly transporting cocaine in western Guatemala. Clearly, he was released soon after.
Whether Hans was working for his mother’s organization we may never know. But he may have learned how to stay in the shadows from his mum’s example. Yuli managed to stay off the law enforcement radar longer than her father and brothers because her trafficking networks were less connected to them and more linked to her man, possibly husband, Jairo Estuardo Orellana Morales. Also known as “El Pelon” because of his bald head, Orellana Morales was allegedly the head of the Guatemalan branch of the brutally violent Zetas gang, which was born in Mexico.
Yuli worked with different suppliers in the region, those close to her case told me when I did some reporting on her following her arrest, so her name didn’t emerge in the evidence that prosecutors gathered against her male family members. The Lorenzana-Cordon family, I was told, was deeply dysfunctional and divided, with Yuli being significantly younger than her brothers.
But she told prosecutors a different story - that she grew up in a “place where my parents loved me.” She reported “close familial ties” and denied “instances of physical abuse, neglect, and substance abuse within the family,” according to court documents. Her parents provided her with “a lot of educational guidance” as well as instilling good principles and values in her and her siblings, she said, according to court documents.
Whatever her childhood was, she seems to have been unfettered by local gender expectations. Prosecutors said that she owned and carried weapons, and threatened and carried out violent acts “without hesitation or trepidation.”
The picture they paint of Yuli contrasts with that of my local contact, let's call him “Juan,” who guided me in Zacapa just a few months before Yuli was arrested.
Juan was a former employee of Yuli’s family. When we met, he’d already lived one life working for them, despite being just in his thirties when I interviewed him.
When I wrote to him this week to ask him what he thought of Yuli’s sentence, he said, via WhatsApp, that “her sentence seems excessive compared to the others [her father and brothers.] She wasn’t that heavy.”
It was common to see her out in the town, he said, before her arrest, taking part in the local pageantry where locals showed off their horses in local festivals. “And usually the anglo saxon system is much more benign when you collaborate,” he said.
I agreed.
The reality is probably that Yuli is lots of different things. A loving mother and daughter. A believer in community and nurturing relationships. An ambitious “cabrona” keen to make her fortune ($27 million was what prosecutors estimated she earned from her trafficking activities over the years). A rural woman with a desire to live life large and to the full using whatever means necessary. Did she do bad things? Clearly. What good she did we have no idea.
I want to know so much more about Yuli. What was she like in school? Did she dream of being a trafficker when she grew up? What other lines of work appealed to her and why? What was the relationship like between her and her brothers and fathers? What did she like to do for fun? Did she read books and watch movies? How did she spend her money?
In Yuli’s case, as transcripts of court proceedings emerge, we may be able to gain a fuller understanding of what motivated her, and understand more than just the tip of her iceberg. Stay tuned.