Jeanine Kitchel writes about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán. Her travel memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, details how she bought land and built a house in a small fishing village on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Her debut novel, a narco lit thriller, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, is available on Amazon as is book 2 in the trilogy, Tulum Takedown.
Quite a ruckus erupted last week over a tweet that suggested the Maya end of the world prophecy was off by eight years. That, dear reader, catapults us right into the cross hairs of—gulp—2020. The prediction, however, was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at the University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted.
With recent global events, that very fear—the world ending—may have already entered your mind.
You no doubt remember the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. As a Mayaphile and long-time student of Maya culture, I wrote a book titled Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the end date of their Long Count calendar, one of twenty-eight in the time-obsessed Maya system.
CALENDAR CONVERSION
Let me explain how the Maya 2012 end of the world "prophecy" made waves in June 2020 news. Even the New York Post took a shot at it. Apparently Tagalogquin did a math check between the Julian calendar, that dates back to 8 CE, and the Gregorian or Christian calendar that first came into being in 1752. After his re-calculations, he came up with this tweet: "Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012.The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years.” With his calculations, the date is June 21, 2020, summer solstice.
The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order. END OF THE WORLD?
Back in 2012, some believed December 21, 2012, might be the end. The media blared non-stop that this was when the Maya Long Count Calendar completed a 5,125 year cycle known as the 13th baktun. The ancient Maya, an advanced culture of mathematicians (they invented zero) and naked eye astronomers, viewed this moment as consequential.
Why is this even important? If the Maya code had not been deciphered a few decades ago, we wouldn’t even have known that an end date to the Long Count calendar existed.
In researching the Maya end date, I realized that converting both Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Maya calendar had been no easy task. Spanish speaking priests were used for the conversion and needed to interact with the Maya who had their own language. Not only was there room for error in language differences, but the Julian calendar had gone through several trial runs over the centuries as the world coped with a one-time-fits-all calendar system. During the conversion, some countries used different calendar renditions simultaneously, and sometime in the 1500s while trying to play catch up, eleven days were lost in a single month. My overall impression: whoever had been relegated to configure dates from Julian to Gregorian to Maya had stared down an impossible undertaking. And furthermore, who was their fact checker? RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ TUM
As the end date became a media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the “Maya prophecy” as it came to be known. Great change can span decades or even centuries, and as with all things Maya, the present is determined by the past. Everything repeats. Everything is a recurring pattern.
In 2012, Nobel laureate in literature, author Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a Quiche Maya from the Guatemala highlands who was forced to leave the country when her government disappeared thousands of indigenous Maya, said this, “There are a lot of people speaking for the Maya with little respect for the sacred Maya calendar or the culture.
“For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is ‘disordered’ time,’ when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.
“The Maya elders say if we do not take right actions today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish.”
Menchú Tum’s prescient words have cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And though world-wide protests over the death of George Floyd and an impending economic crisis may not kill thousands, the stark reality of both drive away any hopes for a soon to be bright future.
2012: THE TRUE MAYAN PROPHECY FILM
In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, by Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the 2012 interview, Menchú Tum said we’re living in a moment of chaos, and though there is global disorder, 2012 would usher in a more balanced period, if only we allow it.
“A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, our personal and collective light,” she said. “We are passing through a period of disordered time which began in 1992 and will last forty years. There are things that happen that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos.” MAYA ELDERS
In the film, Menchú Tum references her spiritual advisors, Maria Faviana Chocoy Alva and Pedro Celestino Pac Noy, who state that apocalyptic predictions misrepresent the meaning of the end of the Maya Long Count cycle known as the thirteenth baktun. Their position is that this would be a time of great transition.
And who cannot agree that this is a time of transition, said Menchú Tum. “For humanity, it is the darkest of times … humanity is being called to a great responsibility, affected by our actions. We call them natural disasters but they are not natural. Much pain is already occurring.” Again, Menchú Tum's sagacious predictions are synonymous with what we are presently living with—the human pain endured by the Covid pandemic, the earth's pain due to our disconnect from Mother Nature, and the atrocities humans have unleashed on the planet. Time, as the Maya might say, will tell.
Is Chichen Itza one of the Maya’s most revered and renowned pyramid sites or a glorified shrine-museum concocted by slick politicians to reap tourist dollars? It’s no secret that the Mexico National Tourist Corporation (MNTC) designed Cancun with the intention of creating a luxury destination that would pull in coveted currency to fill state and government coffers—and if some spilled over into the private sector, so much the better.
BIRTH OF CANCUN
In 1967 the Mexico government’s aim was to find the best locale for an international tourist resort with the finest beaches, the most beautiful water, and the fewest hurricanes. Another requirement would be proximity to its wealthy northern neighbor, the US, so flight times would be minimal. A strip of unpopulated sand at the northeast tip of the Yucatán Peninsula fit the bill—Cancun—a destination so easily accessible that at 9 a.m. one could be in New York and by noon, landing at Cancun International, moments away from a white sand beach and a pitcher of margaritas.
And with that very same intent, as early as the 1920s, long before Cancun was even a glimmer in MNTC’s eye, the Mexico government, along with help from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was priming Chichen Itza to become Mexico’s first full-fledged tourist destination.
Fullbright scholar and former Assistant Professor of Anthopology at University of Washington, Quetzil Castaneda detailed this in his book, In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza. Through prolific research, Castaneda's book explains how it all came about.
TOURIST DESTINATION
Chichen Itza, translated as mouth at the well of the Itzas, had been a tourist destination for over five hundred years when MNTC and the Carnegie Institution hatched their plan. After being twice abandoned by both the Itzas (750 AD) and the Maya (1194 AD) the site became a pilgrimage spot for religious groups in the 1500s because of its sacred cenote. A tourist Mecca for centuries, Chichen Itza was a place the Maya came to pay homage to their gods.
Early explorers Edward H. Thompson and John Lloyd Stephens, artist Frederick Catherwood, along with others fueled the flames of discovery and from their explorations the Yucatec and Hispanic elite, according to Castaneda, began to create a Maya myth or identity—distinctly different from that of either Spain or Mexico.
CITY OF FABLES
In the 1920s, the Mexico government organized excavations under its agency Monumento Prehispanicos, and permitted the Carnegie Institution of Washington, headed in the Yucatán by explorer Sylvanus Morley, to conduct ‘multi-disciplinary’ research in the Yucatán and to excavate and restore what Castaneda calls ‘a city of fables.’ In his book, Castaneda insists the main goal of the Carnegie Institution's Excavations Department was to create a tourist Mecca rather than to restore the site to its original state.
Castaneda believes not only do economic interests (from local to international levels) now compete at the site but different government agencies and levels of state jurisdictions also compete for the slice of Chichen Itza’s tourist pie. Castaneda’s book maintains that the Maya civilization, although very real, has been ‘tweaked’ by competing government agencies to make the ‘reproduction’ of the archeological excavations more desirable to tourists.
In his book he calls Chichen Itza a museum exhibit which represents the Maya through the epochs. The exhibit implies the Maya came from ‘a primitive society or race’ and then rose to a high stature through the creation of the pyramids. But Castaneda argues that the Maya are examined through ‘the eyes of European civilization,’ by which all civilizations are compared and judged. In many ways, Castaneda’s views are similar to those of author Daniel Quinn in his controversial book, Ishmael, which divides the world into two camps: the takers—modern Western civilization—and the givers— indigenous cultures.
Quinn’s premise is that Western man usurps indigenous cultures and these ethnic societies and their “myths” are then lost forever, so that the takers can impose their myth—science—onto the entire world. Quinn equates this with the destruction of all indigenous societies. Castaneda’s book basically concurs with this premise, and in his lament for the Maya, calls what the state and government have done at Chichen Itza a “violation” against Mayan society, and goes so far as to call it on par with rape.
EQUINOX PHENOMENON
Castaneda theorizes the height of the deception takes place every vernal and autumnal equinox (roughly March 20, September 21) since 1974—when Mexico figured out these date were significant to the Maya. According to Castaneda, specific knowledge of the phenomenon dates back to when Morley was excavating the site in 1928, but it was ignored by archeologists, local Maya, and Yucatecos until a thesis was published in Mexico City in 1974 by researcher Luis El Arochi.
El Arochi, after years of study, noted that at 3 p.m. on these dates, sunlight bathed the main stairway of the pyramid Kukulkan (feathered serpent), creating a serpent-like shadow which crept down the pyramid’s massive stairs. El Arochi called this the “symbolic descent of Kukulkan,” and believed it related to Maya agricultural rituals.
Once word was out about the equinox display of light and shadow, Chichen Itza’s Kukulkan pyramid became a tourist magnet. Tourist numbers jumped thirty percent that year. A star was born.
In 1921, Yucatan Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto signed an agreement with Carnegie Institution that gave Sylvanus Morley a renewable ten year permit to conduct scientific study at the ancient Maya city. Among the site projects, studies would be conducted in geology, botany, zoology, climatology agronomy, medicine, physical anthropology, linguistics, history, archeology, ethnography and sociology.
Through these studies the Maya way of life could be dissected. Castaneda insists this allowed the structure of an evolutionary fable that created “ a museum of history” at Chichen Itza.
"With Maya labor from nearby towns, the jungle was peeled back to reveal the ancient stones of decayed buildings. Chichen Itza was restored as a replica of itself and reconstructed into a life size model of an ancient Maya city.
Y TU, FELIPE
Castaneda even goes so far as to state that Felipe Carrillo Puerto, progressive governor of the Yucatán, permitted Morley and the Carnegie Institution to conduct research to create a class consciousness amongst the Maya and forge an ethnic group identity onto them, which was essential to complete the socialist revolution in the Yucatán for which Carrillo Puerto was striving.
In the Yucatán, however, the plan would serve another purpose as well. It would bolster a long stagnant economy based on the former reign of henequen—an all purpose fiber used for making rope and Panama hats—with something yet unseen—tourist dollars.
This contradictory view of Chichen Itza only heightens the mystery of the Maya. For a culture whose entire past was wiped out in an afternoon bonfire conducted by a fanatical priest in 1539, it makes one wonder anew—who were the Maya?
Pirates! Images of swashbuckers with gold teeth, eye patches, and peg legs come to mind -- or Johnny Depp. But in reality, many of the pirates who navigated the waters just off Mexico’s eastern shores from as early as the 1600s were men with unlikely backgrounds for the sport they took on. A handful were full-fledged gentlemen, most with seafaring backgrounds. Many were sanctioned by queens or governments, and a few ended up with titles. Some were hailed as heroes.
A better description of these romantic buccaneers is privateer. In an era when slave trading, spices, and territorial expansion sparked global economics, European nations—England, France, Holland and Spain—waged their wars on the high seas. With Spain’s recent discovery of the New World and its riches, the only unity on the Atlantic was the common goal of sacking all Spanish galleons.
Adventurers by nature, highwaymen by design, the word pirate conjures familiar names from history such as Jean Laffite, Sir Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake. Lesser knowns, however, such as Giovanni de Verrazno and Fermin Mundaca have equally compelling stories.
ISLA MUJERES
While Morgan and Lafitte are said to have walked the shores of Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo and buried treasure there, Isla’s most notorious resident was Fermin Mundaca, a slave trader who transported African slaves to Antilles, preferring the more ‘respectable’ title of pirate. In 1860 when the British campaigned against slavery, Mundaca took a powder on the white sand beaches of Isla Mujeres. There he rented out his boats to the Yucatán government to capture rebel Maya along the coast who were then sold into slavery to Cuban sugar plantations, an act that hardly endeared him to the locals.
On Isla Mujeres, Mundaca used his wealth to build a large hacienda named Vista Alegre. He filled it with livestock, birds, and exotic gardens, still viewable today. The entrance arch, El Paso de la Triguena (The Brunette), was named for a beautiful girl from the village, Martiniana Gomez Pantoja, with whom the elderly pirate fell in love after seeing her one-time only. He nicknamed her the brunette. But the dark-haired beauty, 37 years his junior, married her childhood sweetheart and Mundaca grew lonely and mad. He died at age 55 in Merida, still in love with the girl. To be near his lost love, he built a tomb that remains empty and can be found in Isla Mujeres’ colorful, crowded cemetery, one street before North Beach. Etched on the headstone are the symbols of the pirate—skull and crossbones—with the words he carved as his epitaph, “As you are, I was. As I am, you will be.”
JEAN LAFITTE
Jean Lafitte, born in either Haiti or St. Malo, France, liberated New Orleans twice: first from high tariffs by supplying stolen goods to customers without a middleman, and then by liberating the city of the British in the U.S. Battle of 1812. Targeted at first by Andrew Jackson as a bandit and rogue, he was later named a gentleman and a patriot, for without him, one of the war’s most decisive battles against Britain would have been lost. Soon after he was named Territorial Governor of Galveston, (still Mexican soil) but with changing times, he was harassed by stricter U.S. policies that restricted his maritime activities.
As a farewell and parting shot, he torched Galveston and according to legend, sailed into the Caribbean. Rumor has it he stopped on Isla Mujeres, then moved on to the Gulf of Mexico. In the Yucatán, in the small pueblo Dzilam de Bravo, not far from Progreso, a CEDAM (Club de Exploraciones y Deportes Acuaticos de Mexico) memorial plaque commemorates him. In the town’s cemetery, CEDAM workers found a weathered tombstone with the epitaph, “Jean Lafitte Re-Exhumed.” Could it really be the grave of Lafitte?
CHINCHORRO REEF
Mexico's Quintana Roo coast is rife with pirate stories. Xcalak (100 miles south of Cancun) was a known haven for pirates. Bacalar narrowly escaped their ruin, and Ascencion Bay was one of the great pirate harbors of the 17th century. Wild and isolated, its treacherous mud flats sent countless vessels to their doom, while pirate ships waited in hiding for the passage of Spanish galleons laden with gold, fighting against trade winds on their way to Santiago de Cuba.
In the Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, one exhibit displays how pirates used Banco Chinchorro to their gain. Chinchorro is a deadly circular string of rocks on a low-lying limestone shelf that extends out from the sea. It’s 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, just off the shores of Majahual.
Pirates placed lanterns along the reef, signaling ships this was clear passage. But actually, the lanterns lured them to their doom onto the treacherous rocks. It’s rumored that thousands of ships had their downfall on Chinchorro Reef.A May 2020 archeological expedition near Mahajual brought up a 200-year old sailing ship believed to have fallen prey to pirates.
For more pirate tales, there’s the CEDAM Museum in Puerto Aventuras, north of Tulum. Check out Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal, and Petit Lafitte, a hotel four kilometers north of Playa del Carmen, to see the white sand beaches that may have attracted one pirate extraordinaire. Find a copy of Pablo Bush Romero’s Under the Waters of Mexico. Venture over to Isla Mujeres, and see the renovated Hacienda Mundaca and stroll through the pirate’s gardens, now made into a small zoo. Walk through the cemetery there or drive to Dzilam de Bravo, Yucatan, to view Lafitte’s commemorative plaque and find the gravestone with his name on it. Ahoy, matie! There’s treasure to be found.
Newspapers are going out of business. As the pandemic unfolds, it’s believed that 80 percent of US newspapers will shut their news rooms. Prior to the pandemic, papers were already in free fall. The pandemic promises to place the final nails in the coffin.
As the US began to require stay at home regulations in March, newspaper advertising began to fail. Due to the upstart of craigslist and similar websites offering free advertising in the past several years, papers were already on the ropes and losing ad revenue, especially in classified listings. But news “deserts” were already a thing—geographic locations with no newspaper at all— long before the coronavirus appeared. According to the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media, in the past 15 years, one out of five US newspapers has either disappeared or become a ghost of themselves.
I worked for a small town weekly in northern California years ago, The Chico News & Review. Unfortunately it stopped printing six weeks ago after 45 years. That 80 percent death rate just got personal. Thankfully, it still has an online presence. With crowd sourcing and a new subscription request from the publisher, I’m hoping it can hang in there.
In a recent podcast of On the Media, commentator Brooke Gladstone delved into the dearth of papers. She spoke with Rachel Dissell, former reporter for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, which has been publishing since 1842. In 2000, it employed 350 reporters; today, just 14. Dissell, who’d been with the paper since 2002, gave up her position two months ago so another reporter could have a job. Recently, after 80 years of union membership, Plain Dealer journalists lost their backing with the Newspaper Guild and the unit will dissolve May 17.
But smaller communities suffer the lack of reliable journalism most, according to UNC’s 2018 study. Almost 200 of the 3,143 counties in the US don’t have a newspaper at all, and the southern US suffers more than other regions. Stats show that people who live in emerging news deserts are generally, poorer, older, and less educated than other Americans. They’re overlooked because low-income areas tend to not purchase subscriptions to news services.
The lack of newspapers oftentimes means people in a vicinity that lacks media coverage have no idea what’s happening in their community—from city council coverage to local school board information or even elections. Local papers produce more local content for their communities than TV, radio and online outlets combined.
Will newspapers be one of the many industries that bite the dust due to the virus, along with retail shops, small restaurants, and mom and pop services? Only time will tell, but the forecast looks stormy.
We’re living in the 21st century. Western civilization is far removed from the jungles, the plains and the tundra – so why is the equinox important to us today? Often associated with the first day of spring, the vernal equinox – when day and night are equal in length all over the world – occurs on March 20th this year.
At equinox, the sun crosses directly over the equator and the earth tilts neither away nor towards the sun. Because the equinox is based on the earth’s movement around the sun, there’s a three-day window in which the spring equinox can occur – as early as March 19, and as late as March 21.
WHY THE INTEREST?
But why do we take interest in the equinox? Could be because we humans have always been stargazers. Early on in our coming of age, the ancients made up the constellations and stories about the sky. Today, we’re still gazing at the same sky but with a little more oomph. We’re sending out advanced satellites, telescopes, and Rovers to bring back information from the stars and planets, and we’re writing scientific documents, basically new stories, extolling what lies outside our atmosphere.
So even though we’re in a sophisticated, high tech world, we still celebrate the importance of the relationship between our sun and our planet, the earth. In agrarian times, spring was ushered in by the equinox, which meant it was time to plant crops. That may not be so important to us today, but have you ever wondered why Easter is a floating date rather than the same day each year?
EASTER
Easter’s date, even in these modern times, is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year that full moon is April 6, and Easter falls on April 9. So even though we may consider ourselves far removed from any consequences of the equinox, we are still rooted in a pagan cycle of historic events due to the date of that celestial occurrence. Because the spring equinox has ties to Christianity’s most important event, Easter, many believe it centers on the theme of resurrection, and not only of the earth’s waking call from a dark winter.
One of the most famous equinox ceremonies in North America takes place at the Maya pyramid site of Chichen Itza in Mexico. If you’ve had a chance to be there during spring or fall equinox, you’ve witnessed an astounding performance. About 4 p.m. the sun casts a remarkable shadow onto the looming Temple of Kukulkan due to its placement in the sky, the building’s position, and the Maya’s precise mathematical calculations prefigured more than a millennia ago for this event. The shadow slithers down to the bottom of the staircase and ends at the serpent’s mouth. This spectacular feat was made possible by the Maya’s ability to calculate the sun’s effects on earth at equinox.
THE ANCIENT MAYA AND THE EQUINOX
In the Maya world there are many buildings built to specifications that coincide with the equinox. Some scholars believe the importance placed on it relays to the resurrection of the Maize God, Hunahpu, and the turning from the darkness of winter towards the light of spring, ushering in planting time. The fall equinox no doubt pays homage to the harvest.
WORLD CIVILIZATIONS
On the other side of the globe in Egypt, the equinox also represents a time of resurrection, for the god Osiris. Because of this it is said, the Great Sphinx of Giza is positioned to look directly at the rising sun of the spring equinox. In Cambodia, where scholars say the equinox represents the winning of the forces of light over darkness, the main temple Angkor Wat also aligns with the equinox sun. This seems to be the universal meaning of what is represented by the equinox: rebirth, awakening and light overcoming darkness, exactly what happens as we tilt into spring.
So even though we may be entrenched in this modern world, über-connected with our smart phones and computers and all forms of social media, it’s important to remember there’s a bigger picture out there, and it affects all humanity on our green earth.
It is a thing as simple as how the sun and the earth relate, two days a year, on the equinox.
I always knew that Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, would be a trilogy, documenting the life and adventures of Layla Navarro, sitting head of Mexico's most powerful cartel. Truth be told, the writing came fairly easily, and the characters and plot evolved well.
However easy the writing may have been, that was only the beginning of the self-publishing process. The rest can be quite daunting. Though the second time around was a little easier, it was still no cakewalk.
After finishing the manuscript, finding a good editor is key. Luckily, I hit it off with my editor, Jennifer Silva Redmond, from my first novel, and she came through again. Receiving criticism is part of a writer's life, so it's best to develop a thick skin. I gave myself a few days to let her ideas percolate, and then tackled what I could on a daily basis, folding in her changes. Usually, cutting words, sometimes paragraphs, at times entire chapters, is required to make the book a better read.
Did you know that different fiction genres have different suggested word counts? For my genre, thriller, the norm is seventy thousand words. Literary fiction can go quite a bit longer, but with thrillers, it's important to keep the story moving, and shorter tends to make a better read. In my first novel, I clocked in at an unwieldy ninety thousand words! Jennifer asked me to cut twenty thousand. I must admit I cried a little, thinking that one over, but after I slept on her suggestions, I got out my mental scalpel, and went to work.
Jennifer went over my changes a couple times. I sent it off to a proofreader, and then Jennifer had one more look. Next came sending the manuscript to a text formatter and a cover graphics designer. I was lucky to know fine artist Jill Wyatt Logan from Todos Santos, Mexico, and she allowed me (again) to use one of her incredible paintings for the cover. My graphics designer added the title and author name and the back cover blurb design.
From there, it was time to put everything together. And here's my cover reveal of Tulum Takedown. I hope you like it as much as I do. The book will be out the end of March. Please sign up for my newsletter through my website, www.jeaninekitchel.com, to receive info on the publication date. It will be available in e-book on Amazon for $3.99 and paperback $13.95.
Photo of Mexico's most famous narca, Queen of Cocaine, Sandra Avila Beltrán. Courtesy of The Guardian.Last year, fellow thriller author Carmen Amato and I co-authored this article on The Women of Narco Noir.
They are cops and robbers. Do-gooders and badass babes. They are the women of narco noir, the crime fiction category fueled by today’s drug cartel violence and official corruption in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. In narco noir novels, real events and real people blur into unforgettable fictional characters.
Read the latest thriller by Don Winslow, stream Narcos on Netflix, or hit the theater to catch a showing of Sicario: Day of the Soldado or Miss Bala and you’ll see why narco noir is the mystery genre’s new It Girl.
GENDER ROLES IN NARCO WORLD
Plot drivers in narco noir tales are generally male: El Chapo-like druglords, relentless federal agents, fearless journalists. But female characters are increasingly dominating the storyline with an array of complex personalities and fateful decisions. These women create memorable moments that leap off the page.
There are four prominent female character archetypes in narco noir. Each type appears in every narco noir book, while some, like Don Winslow’s The Cartel, pack them in all at once.
In no particular order, there’s the female narca, the cop, the civilian caught in the crossfire, and the woman who becomes the chess piece or victim who is used to create allegiances or satisfy an itch. Like the women on whom so many of these characters are based, all of the character archetypes are shaped by the war on drugs. It controls what they do, where they go, who they love, and how long they live.
The women of narco noir don’t live behind white picket fences, have BFFs, or join book clubs. Dinner doesn’t materialize nightly at seven. Narco noir women tend to be loners with no husband or significant other to come home to because the drug war has claimed their emotional lives. They’re as tough and as hardboiled as the tales they inhabit.
In an ironic twist of female solidarity, however, these women are bound together by one simple element.
The need to survive.
THE NARCA
Claudia Ochoa Felix, rumored to be El Chapo's main assassin, dead at 32. From Instagram.
The female druglord is a powerful character, competing for smuggling routes and ruthlessness with male counterparts. Amid the paranoia, backstabbing, and shifting alliances of Narcolandia, she’s fighting for a place at the table, a chance to wear the crown, and the respect of partners more used to using women than working with them.
In many cases, circumstances forced their hand due to the loss of a powerful male drug lord. A husband, father, or brother was taken out of the mix due to an unexpected death or incarceration. Females were forced to either step up or be killed by rivals seeking to snatch the spoils—drugs, smuggling routes, and allegiances.
For example, in Don Winslow’s Savages, Elena “La Reina,” the queen of the Baja Cartel, inherits her position after her husband dies. Isabella Bautista, a character in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, is also a female narca to be reckoned with. And who can forget Arturo Perez-Reverte’s thrilling saga The Queen of the South in which Teresa Mendoza escapes to Spain after facing certain death in Mexico when her boyfriend is murdered. She goes on to run a European drug-running empire. The Queen of the South became a hugely popular small-screen series in Spanish starring Kate del Castillo and in English with Alice Braga. The Kate del Castillo version is returning to Netflix in 2019. This time Mendoza has a daughter to protect, upping the survival game.
Likewise, in my novel (Jeanine) Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, anti-hero Layla Navarro rises to the top of the fictional Culiacan Cartel—Mexico’s most powerful—when her notorious drug lord uncle is recaptured. Because her older brother, heir apparent, died in an ambush and the other brother isn’t up to the task, Layla must step in to carry on the family business. When she runs afoul of a dubious cartel jefe during a dangerous delivery of drugs from Guatemala to Mexico, she faces a kill-or-be-killed dilemma.
All of these narca characters are inspired by real-life female narco-trafficker Sandra Avila Beltran, known as ‘La Reina del Pacifico.’ Avila served seven years in prison for trafficking and money laundering, scored an interview with Anderson Cooper, and published a book of her prison interviews.
The Italian mafia provides inspiration as well, with the phenomenon of women as drug lords known as “the rise of the godmother.” Italian women began to face a survival problem after their mafia husbands were jailed, sometimes for life, or killed.
“There’s a growing number of women who hold executive roles,” Gen. Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the military police in Naples, told the Associated Press. “They’re either widows of mob bosses or wives whose husbands are in prison. They hold the reins.”
Survive or die, with either salsa verde or clam sauce.
THE COP
Like the narca, the female cop or federal agent battling the war on drugs operates in a male-dominated atmosphere. Paranoia is a constant companion. Who is a dirty cop? Who can be trusted?
Unlike the narca, however, the cop earns a relative pittance. She’s on the clock. Her location is fixed and her hours are long. There’s little glamour in her life. The work is brutal and often dehumanizing.
In Sam Hawken’s stunning 2013 novel, La Frontera, Texas Ranger Ana Torres may not have wholly lost her soul but she is blunted by the violence she encounters every day along the U.S.-Mexico border. In one strangely disturbing scene, Torres sits and waits for several hours, doing nothing. She is too numb and devoid of inspiration for even simple things like reading a book or drinking coffee to pass the time.
In my (Carmen) noir detective series, Emilia Cruz is the first female police detective in Acapulco, grappling with drug cartels, official corruption, and Mexico’s culture of machismo. Starting with Cliff Diver, Emilia is a woman unafraid to confront the violence in the iconic Pacific coast city, which in 2018 became Mexico’s homicide capital. At the same time, however, Emilia stands to lose her soul in the wreckage. I used my 30-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency to infuse the series with authenticity. Emilia’s perpetual hunt for women who have gone missing—referred to as Las Perdidasor the Lost Ones—was inspired by the hundreds of women missing from the Juarez area. The most recent novel in the series, 43 Missing, is based on the 2014 mass disappearances from the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college not far from Acapulco.
THE CIVILIAN
Female civilian characters in narco noir fiction are often journalists and healers—people attempting to provide honest civil authority. They occupy a tenuous landscape, without the narca’s money or influence, or the firepower and law enforcement authority of the cop or federal agent.
These women have little more than a steel backbone with which to confront the war on drugs.
María Santos Gorrostieta Salazar, the assassinated mayor of Tiquicheo, a small town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, has inspired a number of female characters whose courage serves as a literary tribute to the late physician and politician. Gorrostieta Salazar became mayor upon the assassination of her husband who was the incumbent mayor. During her three-year tenure, she survived three assassination attempts that left her with severe scarring and a colostomy bag which she famously showed to detractors. Gorrostieta Salazar was kidnapped and assassinated by suspected drug traffickers in late 2012.
Federales by Christopher Irvin was a poignant and fictional retelling of her kidnapping and murder from the point of view of her bodyguard.
Marisol Cisneros in Winslow’s The Cartel also bears similarities to Gorrostieta Salazar. Marisol, also a doctor, is wounded in a cartel assassination attempt yet becomes mayor of a small town desperately in need of fearless civil authority.
Real-life journalists have also inspired a number of female characters in narco noir, such as the female journalist played by Rachel Ticotin in the 2004 film Man on Fire.
Anabel Hernandez of Mexico City is best known for her non-fiction book Narco Land and more recently, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students. But before penning these bold treatises about cartels and corruption, she worked as a crime reporter in Mexico City. Her investigative reporting became so abrasive that members of one cartel, falsely identifying themselves as federal police agents and armed with AK-47s, shut off her Mexico City neighborhood to track her down after de-activating security cameras in the area. Luckily she wasn’t home at the time of the manhunt. She was assigned a bodyguard soon thereafter and left Mexico for the U.S. where she taught investigative journalism for two years at UC Berkeley. Eventually, her fame caught up with her, and word has it that she is once again undercover.
The same thing happened to journalist Lydia Cacho. Cacho, described by Amnesty International as “perhaps Mexico’s most famous investigative journalist and women’s rights advocate,” reported tirelessly on sexual abuse against women and children. In her 2003 book, Demons of Eden, Cacho exposed a pedophile and child pornography ring in Puebla, Mexico, that included the top tier of politicos in its membership. Cacho, who lived in Cancun and wrote for Por Esto, was kidnapped and tortured by Puebla authorities two years after the book’s publication. They put her in the trunk of a car and drove twenty hours from Cancun to Puebla where they planned to arraign her. A network of friends and activists sprung into action and bailed her out. When asked how she managed to survive, she stated, “I don’t scare easily.”
Unfortunately, Cacho too had to flee Mexico to remain safe. Her writings are the very basis of narco noir: lurid real-life stories that sound like the stuff of legend, but which in fact are the genre’s backbone.
THE CHESS PIECE OR THE VICTIM
This female character archetype is generally a secondary character and her ability to survive is much more fragile than any other. These characters are prostitutes, girlfriends, child brides, informants, or someone caught in the crossfire. Often resigned to her fate—or too clueless to realize what is happening—a chess piece is used and abused by narcos and cops alike.
As plot devices, they serve to paint a picture of the user/abuser, forge alliances between cartels like European royalty of days long gone, and/or supply information. Especially with regard to the latter, they provide twists that other characters cannot.
In Winslow’s The Cartel, legions of girls pass through the beds of cartel types as the classy Laura Amaro acts as a courier and a recruiter for her husband. The main cartel character marries the teen-aged Eva in order to cement a relationship with her father, in much the same way that real-life head of the Sinaloa Cartel, El Chapo (Juaquín Guzman Loera) married Emma Coronel Aispuro, a Sinaloa beauty queen.
In Cliff Diver, hookers become informants able to reveal the sordid sex life of a crooked cop. Think narco pillow talk. And in the later Pacific Reaper, women are lured into a human trafficking net supplying the narcos.
In Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels, and Survival, a key plot twist turns on narca Layla Navarro’s discovery of a 12-year-old girl, trafficked by her own cartel unbeknownst to herself or her drug lord uncle. The girl is kidnapped from her Guatemala City barrio to be used as a chattel in the lucrative sex trade, one more victim of cartel dominance wreaking havoc on the lives of average citizens.
While perhaps a sharp stick in the eye to the feminist movement, narco noir mirrors true life when it comes to this character archetype, perhaps more so than for any of the other three.
In reality, cartels use women as sex workers, prostitutes, and mistresses, and in Narco Land, Anabel Hernandez describes in detail what became of three women whom El Chapo used for sex while in Puente Grande, Mexico’s maximum-security prison near Guadalajara. During his first incarceration, El Chapo became fixated with 23-year-old fellow inmate Zulema Yulia Hernandez. She became pregnant twice and was forced to abort both times. When El Chapo tired of her, he passed her around like a piece of merchandise to prison managers and inmates alike. While in prison, Hernandez attempted suicide twice, was released in 2008, and was later found dead in a car trunk with the letter “Z” etched into her buttocks, stomach, and breasts.
The second victim of El Chapo’s prison flings was inmate Diane Patricia, who had been charged with murder. In prison, she was repeatedly gang-raped and attempted suicide. El Chapo was called “an animal” by the president of the Jalisco Human Rights Commission which eventually intervened before the rape culture claimed Patricia’s life.
El Chapo’s third victim was Yves Eréndira Moreno who cooked in the prison’s kitchen. Guzman propositioned the single 38-year-old mother many times and for a while, she managed to avoid his advances. Perhaps because she was a little older than his previous prison sex-mates, she survived the sex games he required of her and outlived his stay at the prison. He escaped in 2001, and she had managed to live through it.
In Guzman’s recent trial in New York, various mistresses detailed how they met and were wooed by the drug lord.
These women were decades younger than Guzman, and often served as mules or go-betweens in his various drug dealings. One mistress, a teary-eyed Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, explained one of his many close-calls with the law. The two were holed up at one of his remote mountain hideaways when Mexican military helicopters flew overhead.
He disappeared down a tunnel hidden underneath a bathtub, naked, and onto a waiting motorcycle below. She followed behind and they escaped the authorities, for the moment. Guzman, age 61, moved on to Mazatlan where he met up with his third and current wife, 29-year-old Emma Coronel Aispuro and their twin two-year-old daughters.
Just days later he was apprehended, incarcerated for a second time, and eventually extradited to the U.S. to face charges.
A CRACK IN THE ARCHETYPAL CEILING
Joaquin "El Chapo: Guzman and his wife, Emma Coronel, wearing matching burgundy velvet smoking jacket in court in NYC. (Courtesy: Jane Rosenberg).
Emma Coronel Aispuro was the picture of the loving wife during the infamous trial of El Chapo in New York City earlier this year. Every day, she brought him a new outfit to wear at the trial and one day they even wore matching burgundy velvet blazers, making the media swoon over the apparent sign of solidarity between husband and wife. As the trial closed each day, they blew each other kisses.
With her husband guilty on all counts and locked away in prison for the rest of his life, what will become of Emma Coronel Aispuro?
Will it be worth fictionalizing?
According to numerous reports, she’s going into business, selling El Chapo-branded jeans, dress shirts, sombreros, shoes, accessories, and liquor via an online store. Supposedly, the site describes El Chapo as a “humble seller of oranges with many goals and great ambition.” The fashion venture is already in competition with a similar business set up by one of Guzman’s adult children.
Does this mean that Coronel Aispuro won’t become a narca in her own right? Or be the dutiful chess piece any longer? Will she instead set the wheels turning for another narco noir character archetype?
The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order.
“For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is ‘disordered’ time,’ when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.
