COPPER CANYON'S RECLUSIVE ENDURANCE RUNNERS—THE TARAHUMARA—FACE PRESSURE WHEN CONFRONTED BY MEXICO'S UNDERWORLD

 

Run like the wind. We've all heard the phrase, but perhaps those who best embody it are the Tarahumara Indian tribe of Urique, in Mexico's Copper Canyon.

Originally inhabitants of Chihuahua, the Taramuhara have lived five hundred years in the Copper Canyon region in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains, retreating from their original home in central Mexico when Cortés and his Spanish invaders arrived. Not willing to wait around for trouble, the Taramuhara beat feet, literally, and ran as fast and as far away from danger as they could. This took them to the remote and difficult to access area now known as the Copper Canyon or Canyons in northwestern Mexico.

RARÁMURI

In their native language, they call themselves the Rarámuri, the light-footed ones. Their unique physical abilities were largely unknown to the outside world until 2009 when the book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen, made them famous. In remote communities where there are no roads, horses or burros, the only mode of transport was by foot, thus they ran everywhere.

Author Christopher McDougall wrote, "When it comes to running ultra-distances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara runner—not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner." In his book, he describes a Tarahumara champion who once ran 435 miles and another who won a 100-mile ultramarathon in Leadville, Colorado, with casual ease.

Said fellow Leadville veteran Henry Dupre to "The New York Times," They run so beautifully that they seem to move with the ground. Like a cloud or fog moving across mountains."

Dupre also tagged the Taramuhara as "the kindest, happiest people on the planet," and "benign Bodhisattvas." 

DEFYING CONVENTION

Intriguing, no? Being among one of the world's most primitive Indians and among the world's best long distance runners, they defy convention. First of all, they prefer to run barefoot. In races, however, they are known to wear simple huaraches which they assemble from used tires that they bind together onto their feet with one long strap of leather. 

2006 estimates put their population between 50,000 and 70,000. Most still practice a traditional lifestyle, including inhabiting natural shelters like caves or cliff overhangs. Their diet is corn, beans, and squash, but they still do nomadic grazing of goats, sheep, and cattle. Almost all Rarámuri migrate from one place to another during the course of a year. 

SPANISH INVASION

Even though they initially escaped the Spanish invaders, by the 17th century, the temptation of gold and metals goaded the Spanish into establishing mines in the fierce country of the Tarahumara, making occasional slave raids to obtain mine workers. The Jesuits followed on their heels, expanded their missionary work, and founded a mission at the southern end of the Tarahumara territory. By 1648, the tribe had had enough and waged war against the invaders, destroying one of their missions. After this attack, they split into two groups. The northern group waged war against the Spanish but were defeated while the Jesuits, in the south, reported the Tarahumara were extremely resistant to evangelize. Their tenacity worked and by the mid 1700s most missions in their region ceased to operate. 

THE LEADVILLE TRAVEL ULTRAMARATHON

Fast forward. McDougall's book shone a spotlight on the Rarámuri with the1993 Colorado race, the Leadville Travel ultramarathon—attended by a worldwide crowd—set the stage for the Tarahumara's first act in 300 years. The Leadville ultra forces racers to run and climb one hundred miles over scrabbly trails and snowy peaks in Colorado's Rockies. It's closer to mountaineering than marathoning, says McDougall, and it continues all day and into the night. Runners grind along at 15 minutes a mile as they head towards Hope's Pass, a 12,600 foot peak. 

In "Runner's World," McDougall wrote, "Along with Polar-fleeced top guns at the starting line were a half dozen middle-aged guys in togas, smoking butts, and shooting the breeze, deciding if they should wear new Rockport cross-trainers they'd been given or their homemade sandals from scavenged tires from a nearby junkyard." 

According to McDougall, most opted for the sandals. And, he continues, they weren't stretching or warming up or showing the faintest sign they were about to start one of the most grueling ultramarathons in the world. In fact, most, he said, were nursing hangovers. 

MYSTERIOUS LEGEND

Their curious appearance matched the mysterious legend—they defy every known rule of physical conditioning and still speed along for hundreds of mile. The Tarahumara didn't work out, or stretch, or protect their feet. They chain-smoked fierce black tobacco, ate a ton of carbs and barely any meat, and chugged so much cactus moonshine that they were either drunk or hung over,  it's estimated, one-third of the year—one on their backs for every two on their feet—as explained by Dick and Mary Lutz in their book, The Running Indians. 

"Drunkeness is a matter of pride, not shame," wrote Dick and Mary Lutz. "And yet," the Lutzes insist, "There is no doubt they are the best runners in the world."

Running With the Ramámuri

SURPRISING THE SCIENTISTS

Leadville would test the Lutzes' claim, and once the starting gun sounded at 4.am., a sea of taller heads quickly swallowed the native runners who faded into the middle of the pack behind the world's most scientifically trained ultra runners. But as the sun rose and the course began the climb to Hope's Pass peak, the Tarahumara began to ease forward.

Not only were the Tarahumara gaining but they seemed to be getting stronger, said Joe Vigil, legendary American track coach who was at the ultra Leadville.

"They had such a sense of joy," Vigil would later say. And they had reason to be happy. At the finish line with a time of 20:03:33, 55-year old Victoriano Churro, farmer and oldest Tarahumara attendee, won the race at 20:03:33, followed by Cemido Charcarito in second, and Manuel Luna in fifth. The three Tarahumara were still bouncing along on their toes as they crossed the line. A year later, another Tarahumara runner won, Juan Herrera, finishing at 17:30:42.

Victoriano Churro, Winner Leadville 1993

VANISHED

Then, they vanished from the ultra running scene in the mid-90s, retreating to their canyon bottom homes and taking their miraculous distance running secrets with them. But one runner, the Caballo Blanco (White Horse), set out after them. The mysterious Blanco went to the Copper Canyons years ago to live among the Tarahumara. 

Blanco spoke with McDougall. "They eat beans, they drink a home-brewed corn beer which takes four pints to get you drunk, and they use it as a beer-based economy instead of cash. It can lead to good amounts of inebriation but they are also extremely hard workers.

"The Tarahumara," he continued, "just farm and party and run for fun, all the while staying in remarkable condition."

In 1971, physiologist Dale Groom ran cardiovascular tests on the adults and children, and concluded, as he'd write in "American Heart Journal," that probably not since the days of the ancient Spartans has a people achieved such a high state of physical conditioning. 

VITAL STATISTICS

Groom checked the pulse and blood pressure of Tarahumara runners during a five-hour race and found their blood pressure went down while running, and their average heart rate—in the midst of banging out eight-minute miles—was only 130 beats per minute. But what most impressed him was something that didn't register on his instruments: After running 50 miles, the Tarahumara didn't even look beat. They stood around and chatted while Groom pumped the diastolic cuff. 

Joe Vigil coached 19 national collegiate championship teams. Three advanced degrees hang on his office wall. He said nothing he's ever seen on the track or in physiology books left him prepared for what he witnessed at Leadville in 1993. The harder the Tarahumara fought their way through the Rockies, the more rapturous they became. Glee and determination are usually antithetical emotions, he said, yet the Tarahumara were brimming with both at once. It's as as if running to the death made them feel move alive. "It was quite remarkable," he commented. 

Heart disease, high blood pressure, and lethal cholesterol are virtually unknown among the Tarahumara, Vigil would later learn. So are crime, child abuse, and domestic violence. 

MAKING INROADS

In 1994, Caballo Blanco gave up his real name: Micah True. He was a gringo, though for a long while no one could pin a nationality on him. He said he'd had his own encounter with the Tarahumara at Leadville. He'd heard about their incredible performance the year before and wanted to see them in action for himself. But instead of competing, he offered himself as a guide. He teamed up with a Tarahumra runner over the back half of the course, he says, and "we spent the next ten hours together. Even though we didn't speak the same language, somehow we could joke and communicate."

Caballo Blanco aka Micah True (Runner's World)

After the race, he was as obsessed as Vigil with learning the Tarahumara secrets, and since nothing anchored True to his home in Colorado but an old Chevy pick-up and a one-man landscaping business, he could just hang out. But the tricky part, he learned, would be gaining access. The Tarahumara, for very good reason, refer to most outsiders as "white devils." They may let researchers monitor their hearts, but not look into them.

"I  did have one thing working for me," True aka Caballo Blanco said. "When you act out of love, good things happen. It's a law."

A NEW KIND OF RACE

The next part of this story is of a different kind of race—that of hauling a 50-pound backpack of marijuana across the border into the New Mexico desert.

With its remote location and few viable roads, the Copper Canyons have become an attractive hideout and throughway to the border for cartels. The best seller, Born to Run, had a staggering impact on the amateur-running world and its fame gave a painful twist to a formerly uplifting tale.

Copper Canyon (From WorldNomads.com)

Drug traffickers took notice and now exploit the very Tarahumara trait—endurance—that has been crucial to their survival. Cartel operatives enlist impoverished Tarahumara Indians to make a grueling odyssey running drugs by foot across the border into the U.S. 

UNLIKELY JOURNEY

Camillo Villegas-Cruz, 21, is languishing in a U.S. federal prison in California on the edge of the Mojave Desert. His unlikely journey from young athlete to drug mule shows a young man from a little-known tribe as just one of many being used by the cartels. The Taramuhara, catapulted into the limelight by a runaway best seller, are being ground down by forces out of their control, including Mexico's all-consuming drug war, a disastrous economy, and an unrelenting 70-year drought.

American defense lawyers on the southwest border say Tarahumara drug runners are a growing segment on their court-appointed clients. According to "Newsweek," Ken Del Valle, a defense attorney in El Paso, says he's represented more than a dozen of the tribe since 2007, all in similar backpacking cases. Statistics are impossible to come by as law enforcement doesn't differentiate between Indians and other Mexicans, but Del Valle says it is precisely the Tarahumara's aptitude for endurance running that makes them so heavily recruited. 

HARSH LANDSCAPE

But even in the best of times, many Tarahumara live on the edge, eeking out just enough to survive. Now farmers can't get most food crops to grow, and last winter an usual cold spell killed off much of what they did plant. That left them desperate—easy prey for wealthy drug barons looking for mules. 

Mexico's Copper Canyon Region

"It's tragic and disgraceful," says McDougall in a "Runner's World" article. "This is a culture that has tried its best to stay out of this mess, the messes of the world, and now the messes have come and found them."

"I can't even weigh the cultural impact of what the drug industry is doing to the Tarahumara," says Randy Gingrich, an American based in the city of Chihuahua for 20 years. He spends much of his time in the Sierra Madre and his NGO, Tierra Nativa, battles threats to the Tarahumara and other Indian tribes that come from miners, loggers, drug dealers, and the occasional tourist scheme.  He related that one former drug baron forcibly evicted Tarahumara from their ancestral homeland so he could build a giant Astroturf ski slope overlooking the 6,000 foot Sinfrorosa Canyon. The project fell through when the trafficker died in a plane crash.

But this is just one single situation in the manipulation of the Tarahumara that was dismantled by an act of fate. The drug trafficking will not stop. And unless the rains come and the economy recovers, young runners will continue to be coerced into tragic positions that may well lead to years in prison north of the border.

An unfitting end for a race that has tried to avoid the temptations of society, and live a life in peace. 

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS POST CHECK OUT—Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy is on Amazon.

 

CAN MEXICO KEEP ITS JOURNALISTS ALIVE?

                                             "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)

For more information on my writing, check out my website www.jeaninekitchel.com. My first book, a travel memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, is available on Amazon as are books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown. Subscribe above to keep up to date with future blogs on Mexico and the Maya and the Yucatán.

STAYING ALIVE—ARE MEXICO JOURNALISTS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES?

 

                              "We are not war correspondents. The war came to us."

Reporters holding photos of murdered colleagues (photo Rio Grande Guardian)

Since 2000, 119 journalists were murdered in Mexico because they dared to write about cartel violence and corruption. Thirty-five remain missing. A 2019 report by International Institute for Strategic Studies states 23,000 were killed due to the country’s “War on Drugs,” christened as such by President Felipe Calderon in 2006. Since 2000 due to cartel violence, nearly 200,000 are dead.

Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Last December alone, three Mexican journalists were shot within ten days.

“You want to kill a journalist, you can do it without much of a chance that you’ll be caught,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico representative of CPJ.

The Cartel Project (photo Forbiddenstories.org)

THE CARTEL PROJECT

In response to the disturbing rise of Mexican journalist murders, The Cartel Project, a global network of investigative journalists coordinated by Forbidden Stories, emerged to continue work by reporters who had been threatened, censored, or killed. Working together across 18 different countries over a ten-month period, they investigated the global networks of Mexican drug cartels and their political connections around the world.

The cornerstone of this collaborative work is Regina Martinez, journalist for Proceso, a national investigative weekly out of Veracruz. Eight years after her death in April 2012, The Cartel Project’s reporting team picked up where her work left off. Throughout her tenure at Proceso, she wrote scathing commentaries on two successive governors in Veracruz who looted the treasury and allowed cartels to operate freely with help from local and state police.

MARTINEZ'S MOXY

Martinez was on the verge of publishing a blockbuster of a story. Her reporting would disclose that traffickers and their accomplices had executed thousands of people: teenage dealers, their families, farmers, politicians, even young women who attended cartel sex parties. She’d discovered an exponential rise in the number of bodies being buried in pauper’s graves. She believed that public cemeteries were being used to dispose of victims of forced disappearances. 

Martinez interviewing AMLO, 1992 (photo Alberto Morales Garcia)

The Cartel Project noted that Martinez told a friend it was the most dangerous investigation of her career. Shortly after that confession, she was murdered in her Xalapa home, beaten then asphyxiated with a dish towel. This killing of a high-profile correspondent for a national magazine set off a wave of targeted violence throughout the country. Martinez was one of the few reporters who dared to refuse bribes or to ignore cartel threats aimed at censoring the news. She paid for it with her life.

JOURNALISTS AS TARGETS

In their investigation, the Cartel Project found that before her death, Martinez was one of a group of journalists targeted by a sophisticated espionage unit run by the Veracruz Public Security Ministry. The unit used surveillance technology and a vast network of informants to gather information, monitoring those believed to be political opponents of the governor. Leaked reports showed analysts maintained files for decades on hundreds of targets, their family members and co-workers, including info on their hangouts and political affiliations.

Martinez’s looming bombshell of an investigation was her death sentence. “She was becoming very inconvenient for people in power,” said a fellow journalist.

She was killed before her story came out. The murder investigation of her death was botched and investigators ignored the fact that her death had been caused by her investigative work. The final report stated she had been killed in a robbery gone wrong. During the ten-month open investigation, murders of journalists escalated, with ten more reporters killed in that time.

Regina Martinez (Elfaro.net)

LA CHAPARITTA

"Fearless,” said Jorge Carrasco, director of Proceso where Martinez worked as a correspondent from 2000 until her death in 2012. “Everything the local press didn’t dare to publish was published via Regina Martinez."

Born into a family of 11 children, Martinez studied journalism and began reporting news for a local Veracruz TV station in 1980. Called Chaparrita, or “little woman,” in reference to her height of 4 feet, 11 inches and 100 pound frame, she made a name for herself in the field.

“Her work was her life," said fellow journalist and friend Norma Trujillo. “She was really interested in social issues, human rights violations. She was close to the people. That was her superpower.”

It also didn't hurt that she was a gifted reporter, going after the tough stories. Three years before the H1N1 crisis exploded in 2006, she covered the horrible sanitary conditions on pig farms in La Gloria, a Veracruz pueblo that eventually was named the probable epicenter of the virus. And one year later, she accused the Mexican Army of raping and killing a 72-year old indigenous woman.

                                                                                    

THE GOVERNORS

                                                                                                         

Call to action. (Dartcenter.org)

No matter how dangerous the road, she traveled it. Her doggedness led her to investigate the excesses of power and corruption in Veracruz. That, no doubt, was her undoing. Fidel Herrera and Javier Duarte, who served as back to back governors in Veracruz, became central figures under the pen she wielded like a sword in her investigative journalism.

Under these two governors, Veracruz became the world’s most dangerous place for journalists. Since 2000, 28 journalists have been killed there and another eight disappeared— half during the 12 years these men held office. 

The Cartel Project's reporting team discovered that law enforcement authorities in Mexico, the US, and Spain had opened inquiries into allegations that Herrera colluded with the Zeta cartel as governor and took money for his campaign. He also money laundered while serving in a diplomatic post in Spain, but to date has not been charged with a crime. Duarte is serving a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and money laundering.

Part two in the series will pay homage to other Mexico journalists who died while reporting on Mexico cartels. Stay tuned.

Check out www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, my memoir on expat life in Mexico.

THE WOMEN OF NARCO NOIR

                  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?

Perhaps a new tale is yet to be written.

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