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.
"Being a journalist is like being on a black list."
Javier Valdez Cárdenas (theguardian.com)
MEXICO JOURNALISTS
PART 2
Mexico reporter and author Javier Valdez Cárdenas said, “The government's promises of protection are next to worthless if the cartels decide they want you dead.”
And that proved to be the case on a May day in 2017 in Culiacan, Sinaloa, where the fifty-year old journalist was dragged from his car at noon and shot 12 times in front of Riodoce, the newspaper he co-founded in 2003.
As Valdez had presciently stated, “Even though you may have bullet-proofing and bodyguards, the gangs will decide what day they are going to kill you.”
Valdez, well-known for his amiable nature, wide smile and Panama hat, was one of 119 Mexican journalists assassinated since 2000 because they dared to report news about the cartels.
INTERNATIONAL PRESS FREEDOM AWARD
Valdez accepting International Press Freedom Award (cpj.org)
In a three-decade long career, the award winning reporter chronicled not only stories of Mexico’s organized crime, narco-trafficking, and the corruption of government officials, but also the unseen side—tales from musicians who composed the narco-corridos, mothers whose sons had been murdered, kids from unknown pueblos who dreamed of becoming hitmen. He spoke at a reception in 2011 when he received an International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) where he was introduced as a writer who “combined the grit of a battle hardened reporter with the soul of a 19th century romantic poet.”
In his acceptance speech he said, “The youth will remember this as a time of war. Their DNA is tattooed with bullets and guns and blood, and this is a form of killing tomorrow. We are murderers of our own future."
THIS IS A WAR
“This is a war,” he continued, “one controlled by the narcos, but we the citizens are providing the deaths and the governments of Mexico and the US, the guns.”
Javier Valdez Mural (by Julio Cesar Aguilar, theintercept.com)
He watched as mayhem ensued, recording in his writings the sins and violence inflicted by cartels on his native citizens. He wrote about countless colleagues’ deaths, but somehow, he carried on. What may have secured the nail in Valdez’s coffin occurred shortly after El Chapo Guzman, notorious Sinaloa Cartel drug lord, was extradited to the US in January 2017, after his third arrest.
Though Valdez’s reporting on the cartels had been tolerated prior to Chapo’s extradition, his attempt to explain the power struggle taking place inside the Sinaloa Cartel after Chapo’s departure may have pushed his once untouchable status to the limit. The splintering, Valdez reported, occurred because there were now two factions in the Sinaloa Cartel. Two of Guzman’s sons, known as the Chapitos, led one faction, while Damaso Lopez, a prison warden and right hand man who helped Chapo in his first prison escape in 2001, led the other. Infighting raged well into February.
DANGEROUS LIASONS
In March a man called the Riodoce offices and spoke to Valdez, requesting a meeting after explaining he had important information. Valdez agreed to meet the man in a car in a parking lot, a risky endeavor. The man was a lieutenant of Damaso Lopez, and while sitting in the car, called his boss then passed the phone to Valdez. Lopez claimed he had not betrayed El Chapo, stating he “loved and admired” his boss. But Lopez also criticized Chapo’s sons, the Chapitos, saying they were “sick with power.”
Remembrance for Javier Valdez (cps.org)
In his career spanning decades, Valdez had reported from deep within the narco world. Most of his sources were lower down on the food chain, and Valdez protected their identity with anomynity. Printing the words of someone higher up the chain of command, like Damaso Lopez, raised the stakes, pulling Valdez and his paper into the fight. In the end, Valdez decided to print the story, believing the information was important for the public to know.
THE CHAPITOS' END GAME
Before the issue ran, he received a call from a representative of the Chapitos, requesting a meeting at a nearby cantina. The Chapitos’ envoy said that the interview with Lopez could not be published because Lopez was a cartel insurgent. Valdez said it was too late—thousands of copies had already been printed and would go on stands the next day. The next morning when delivery trucks began dropping off papers, cartel affiliates followed, buying up every copy. Few copies were seen by the public.
With that action, Valdez realized he may have reached his expiration date with the Sinaloa Cartel. He contacted the Committee to Protect Journalists and discussed relocating. He ultimately decided against the move however, thinking it would be too difficult for his family, and in the next few weeks, the problem seemed to dissipate.
In an interview with Index on Censorship just a month before his death, he explained some journalists had to flee Mexico under threat of death. In his book, Narco Journalism, he described the Mexico journalist's plight: exiled, murdered, corrupted, terrorized by cartels or betrayed by police or politicos in bed with the cartels.
"Now they kidnap, extort, control the sale of arms, beer, taxis. They control hospitals, police officers, the army, people in government and those who finance them. The omnipresent narco is everywhere.”
Even in the newsroom. In his book Narco Journalism, he wrote that local newspapers hired the occasional reporter on payroll who was a narco plant. “This has made our work much more complicated. Now we have to protect ourselves not only from politicians and narcos, but even other journalists,” he wrote.
Valdez’s final article was about a protest in Culiacán against the deadly attacks teachers face by traveling and working in some of Sinaloa’s most dangerous areas. At least six teachers had been killed in the state that year, 2017.
NO TO SILENCE
In spite of his international profile, Valdez knew he was not protected. After fellow journalist Mirosalva Breach was shot in front of her son in Chihuahua, he tweeted, “Let them kill us all, if that is the death penalty for reporting this hell. No to silence.”
Valdez was silenced forever on May 15, 2017, gunned down in the street as he was leaving to have lunch with his wife. At first the murder was attributed to Damaso Lopez, but Lopez testified under oath during Guzman’s trial in New York City in 2019 that neither he nor his son, Damaso Lopez Serrano, murdered the journalist. He attributed the assassination to the Chapitos, El Chapo’s sons.
But with Mexico's appalling track record on closing out cases, Valdez's true killer may never be known. Suffice it to say it was cartel related.
Valdez’s last book, The Taken—True Stories of the Sinaloa Drug War, tells the stories of ordinary people, caught in a terrifying net—migrant workers, teachers, teens, petty criminals, police officers and local journalists. Building on a rich history of testimonial literature, he recounts stories from people whose world did not center on drugs or illegal activities but on survival and resilience, and how they dealt with fear, uncertainty and the guilt that afflicts survivors and witnesses. His last book was a testament to the people of Mexico.
RIP Javier Valdez.
Javier Valdez (assassination.globalinitiative.net)
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?
