This Bolivian Beauty Queen Got Arrested But Her Narco Boyfriend Escaped
Alondra Mercado Campos got arrested in Bolivia days before Christmas. Her narco boyfriend Andres Vasquez allegedly slipped out the back of the house they shared during the government raid.
Alondra Mercado Campos did not have herself a merry little Christmas.
Hidden nearby the traditional festive Nativity scene the 22-year-old former beauty queen had likely had set up in the house that she shared with her boyfriend in the Bolivian city of Trinidad were more than a hundred pieces of ammunition that the state prosecutor said was for “war weaponry.”
And on Alondra’s mobile phone was a video that documented her helping said boyfriend, Andres Vasquez, load drugs onto an aeroplane for delivery to other parts of the region, according to press reports.
Vasquez, who is a suspected drug trafficker and also known as Yassi V., apparently slipped off when the authorities came knocking in late December, leaving Alondra to face the music alone.
The luxury vehicle that former Miss Bolivia (2020), as well as city (2019) and state (2020) beauty queen and psychology graduate, drove also tested positive for cocaine, according to the state prosecutor Gerardo Balderas.
So Alondra spent the dawn of 2024 locked in a cell, where she’ll be for a minimum of 30 days as she’s investigated and charged for her role in the drug trafficking activities allegedly run by her man. The Public Ministry is pushing to keep her there for three months as prosecutors build charges against her.
The IG influencer, who currently has some 42,000 followers, posted the kind of advice weeks before her arrest that she might well channel during her time in custody.
“Don’t think about the past or the future. Only the here and now. This moment. What is happening now - what you feel and what you live. Enjoy it. Tomorrow, and the day after that, we’ll see. What happened yesterday doesn’t matter anymore. Live in the now and do it with passion. Love as much as you can. Give a lot of hugs. Be happy. Do what fills you up. And make the most of every moment with the people you have by your side. That is worth its weight in gold. As well as life itself….”
Alondra - who can be seen striking a multitude of poses here - favours a look that bears a striking resemblance to, well, perhaps dozens if not hundreds of beauty queens who have embraced “la vida loca” and integrated into the ranks of organised crime across the region. I can’t say that they have all fallen victim to it, because despite the gender stereotypes that dictate women can only be fooled, dragged or forced into the drug trade, it is the life that many women choose.
Alondra’s straight, dark hair, perfect nose and exaggerated curves bring to mind particularly Emma Coronel, herself a former beauty queen and the wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is now serving life in a Colorado prison.
“Emma Coronel is the prototype of the ideal body type for many women,” Isaac Tomas Guevara Martinez, a social psychologist who studies violence in the state of Sinaloa, told me when I was reporting on the narco wife look for VICE News.
Emma met El Chapo when she was taking part in a beauty contest in the tiny town of Canelas, in the Mexican state of Durango at the age of 17.
“He was dancing with another girl, I was dancing with my boyfriend, and we met right in the middle of the dance floor. He smiled at me, all flirty,” Coronel remembered in an interview with Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández in 2016 that I quote in my book “NARCAS: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels,” (Beacon July 2023).
“Then someone said to me, ‘The señor has asked if you want to dance with him.’ And I said, ‘OK.’”
Emma grew up around the narco business, which is one of the most profitable in both Durango and neighbouring Sinaloa. Her father, Inés Coronel Barreras, was also a trafficker, and his daughter’s close relationship with El Chapo was good for business. The trafficking world in Latin America has generated an aspirational culture, narcocultura (narcoculture) where the point is not necessarily to BE a narco, but to look like one. “For many Sinaloan women, their life’s focus is to marry a narco because of what it implies—the lifestyle, clothes, house, cars,” Guevara Martinez said.
Two years after meeting Coronel, El Chapo made his first appearance (to much controversy) on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, cementing his wealth and fame, and making him officially a catch.
And don’t assume that beauty queen wives only look the part. Emma served just under three years for her role in her husband’s criminal activities, and pleaded guilty to spending his ill-gotten gains and helping mount his most spectacular prison escape yet from a high-security facility in Mexico. She was released last year.
Emma isn’t the most powerful woman in the Sinaloa Cartel - that ignominious honour goes to Guadalupe Fernández Valencia - but she is (was?) the most visible.
She’s also part of a beauty queen trend, brought to life by the startling 2011 movie “Miss Bala” (Miss Bullet), which I urge you to see if you haven’t already. The main character, the aspiring and then-beauty queen Laura Guerrero was based on the real-life story of Laura Zuñiga, who was a Mexican beauty queen arrested alongside gangsters in Mexico in 2008, but you can really just take your pick of other influencers of the cinematic thriller.
Unlike Guerrero and Zuñiga, many do not survive their time in the ranks of organised crime. Maria Susana Flores “died like a mobster’s moll, carrying an AK-47 assault rifle into a spray of gunfire from Mexican soldiers,” the AP reported in February 2023.
It’s not just taking part in drug trafficking that’s a risk to women’s lives. So is the beauty queen / narco wife image popularised by the likes of El Chapo’s wife Emma, which is known as the “buchona” look. “Buchona” was originally a local word used in northern Mexico to describe the women romantically involved with narcos. But the term has now come to mean the body so many women there aspire to for the status and association that it implies: Big busts and butts, combined with a tiny waist, that are achievable only via surgery.
I reported extensively for both VICE News and the book on how women in Sinaloa are dying because of their desperation to look the part, mostly at the hands of doctors who claim to be plastic surgeons but really aren’t.
As for our girl Alondra, getting arrested as her narco boyfriend made out the back door might prompt her to conclude that having a narco boyfriend isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.
Not my type.
I doubt she cares, my friend. She has bigger problems to deal with right now. But I think she should consider dumping Vasquez, no?