In the hyper-masculine world of Latin-American drug cartels, it’s typically the women you must watch.
That’s how the Mexican navy hunted down one of the world’s most-wanted traffickers – Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes – in a daring operation earlier this yr that included particular forces storming his hideout in Jalisco state.
Among the eye-catching particulars of that raid – which provoked a wave of retaliatory violence throughout the nation that left a number of American tourists stranded – is how the navy lastly tracked down a person who had been on the run for years, was needed by each Mexican and US authorities, and had a $15 million bounty on his head.
They merely tracked one of his lovers, who inadvertently led them to a cabin within the mountains of Tapalpa in western Mexico, the place one of essentially the most infamous criminals of his technology was hiding out.
While authorities have saved the small print surrounding the thriller girl intentionally sparse, her involvement in a single of Mexico’s most vital anti-drug operations lately underscores the function of women within the internal circles of Latin America’s drug cartels.
It is an underworld that, although coloured by a powerful tradition of machismo, has women carving out roles in any respect ranges of the hierarchy – from trophy wives to smuggling operatives to prison masterminds.
And whereas hitmen and foot troopers nonetheless are usually males, it’s typically women who’re best-suited to the logistical and monetary sides of cartel operations, consultants say – particularly if they’re married to bosses and have front-row seats to the motion.
“If you are the wife of a senior cartel boss, you are likely read into their logistics, their operations, their strategies,” stated Henry Ziemer, an professional on organized crime on the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So, when your husband is captured or killed, it’s possible that you’re able to take over a large chunk of the business.”
One of Latin America’s most colourful feminine crime bosses was Colombia’s “Queen of Cocaine” Griselda Blanco, the main target of Netflix’s sequence “Griselda,” who had no fewer than three husbands (all companions in her prison enterprises) throughout her ascent to notoriety within the Miami drug wars of the Seventies and 80s.
At the peak of her energy, Blanco, often known as “the godmother,” was answerable for transport multi-ton shipments of cocaine from Colombia to Miami, based on authorities. Linked to the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, she was the mastermind of dozens of killings, based on Miami-Dade investigators – and was apparently each bit as violent, if no more so, than her male counterparts. Infamous for operating a community of gunmen generally known as the Pistoleros, she had a penchant for drive-by shootings – one of which killed a toddler.
“Even by the context of how hits were taken out in the cartels across the Americas in the 70s and 80s, she’s still pretty ruthless,” Claire White, director of training at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, instructed NCS.
But violence wasn’t Blanco’s solely means of wielding energy. Like different feminine crime bosses, her actual prowess was organizing the logistics and monetary facets of her cartel’s empire, reportedly value a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars}. Adept at cash laundering and overseeing distribution operations, she ran an actual property empire and a manufacturing facility that made undergarments with hidden pockets designed for smuggling contraband.
As a girl she additionally discovered it simpler than her male counterparts to recruit different women, who she typically employed as smugglers.
“She had that ability to recognize skills and see women and put them into those positions,” stated Elaine Carey, historian and writer of “Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime.”
“Griselda was actively recruiting women to be within the organization and work alongside her.”
Blanco was additionally expert at evading the regulation. Despite being indicted in 1975 on federal costs of conspiring to fabricate, smuggle and distribute cocaine within the US, she was not caught till February 1985, when she was arrested by DEA agent Bob Palombo in Irvine, California. According to Palombo, when his group burst in, she was in mattress, studying a Bible.
That yr, Blanco was sentenced to fifteen years in jail on federal drug trafficking costs. Nine years into her sentence, the state of Florida charged her with ordering three killings relationship to the early 80s, together with that of the toddler. She pleaded responsible and served each sentences concurrently. Following her launch in 2004, she was deported to Colombia, the place she reportedly lived a quiet life earlier than being gunned down whereas leaving a butcher store in 2012.
Talking about her case at the time she was charged over the deaths, Al Singleton, a sergeant with the Miami-Dade Police Department, stated authorities believed Blanco was answerable for dozens of killings within the Miami space.
“If she was not one of the most prolific traffickers in the Miami area, she clearly was one of the most violent. We’ve got her, conservatively, estimating her to be involved in at least 40 homicides between Miami, Queens and Broward County,” he stated.
Her youngest son, Michael Corleone Blanco – named after the character in “The Godfather” – instructed The Mob Museum in 2025 his mom had by no means been one for taking a again seat.
He recalled watching as a baby when gunmen killed his father – Blanco’s third husband, the financial institution robber and murderer Dario Sepulveda – following a custody dispute between his dad and mom after they separated.
His mom had all the time denied widespread claims she was behind the killing, Michael stated. Still, he famous, “Even though my father was a man amongst men … she [Blanco] was the boss … and she would scream, and she would tell him what to do.”
Though not technically a cartel spouse like Blanco, Antonella Marchant, who ran Chile’s feared Los Marchant clan alongside her father, additionally specialised in financials and logistics, based on Chilean authorities.
Her cartel was identified for importing giant portions of cocaine from Bolivia and distributing it within the southern half of Chile’s capital Santiago, Chilean prosecutor Yans Escobar instructed NCS.
One such operation in December 2021 concerned greater than 300 kilograms of the drug, based on the Chilean judiciary, which in 2023 sentenced Antonella and her father, Francisco Antonio Marchant Iglesias, every to fifteen years in jail, and her older brother, Ricardo, to 12.
While Antonella, Ricardo and their father all admitted drug trafficking, Francisco insisted he was the point of interest of the operation and had not needed his household to get entangled.
The judiciary, nonetheless, didn’t purchase Francisco’s account. Describing Antonella’s function as monitoring drug shipments and accumulating funds and her father’s as coordinating their relationship with suppliers, it stated, “it was clear that the leadership of the gang rested primarily with Antonella Marchant.”
Her case provides the mislead the concept it’s all the time the son who takes over the household enterprise.
“The reality is, organized crime is becoming more gender balanced,” stated The Mob Museum’s White.
The spouse of “El Mencho” is one other working example. Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia, generally known as “La Jefa” or “The Boss,” is somebody Carey calls “drug trafficking royalty.”
Her brother Abigael and the Los Cuinis family-based cartel he led have been each sanctioned by the US and added to the Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals List in 2015. Another brother, Jose Gonzalez Valencia was a Los Cuinis chief and co-founder who was sentenced to 30 years in 2025 for drug trafficking – however had been making an attempt to import cocaine into the US since no less than 2006, based on the US Justice Department.
Los Cuinis has been intently aligned with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel – a bond the DOJ says was “strengthened by familial ties.” According to the DEA, Los Cuinis served because the monetary and logistical arm of the Jalisco cartel and oversaw its “diverse network of money laundering operations.”
Indeed, El Mencho owes his personal ascent within the Jalisco cartel to Rosalinda – slightly than the opposite means round.
“In reality, El Mencho reached the (Jalisco) cartel’s leadership through a diplomatic strategy via marriage,” stated Mexican public safety professional David Saucedo.
Mexican authorities have lengthy suspected Rosalinda of being one of the group’s monetary masterminds and charged her with money laundering in 2018, solely to launch her months later as a result of of inadequate proof.
Then in 2021 she was arrested and accused of serving as a monetary operator for a prison group. Mexican authorities described the detention as a “significant blow to the financial structure of organized crime in the state of Jalisco.”
In 2023 she was sentenced to 5 years in jail for “operating with resources of illicit origin” however was launched in 2025 for “good behavior,” based on Mexico’s Attorney General’s workplace.
Deborah Bonello, writer of “Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels,” cautions in opposition to viewing Rosalinda’s affect merely by means of the lens of her marriage.
“Rosalinda’s role in the cartel is pretty fundamental in the sense that she has always been involved in the money side,” she stated. “(Besides) when people in that world are married, they’re not living what you and I would consider a conventional marriage. Who knows whether they were still romantically involved?”
‘Buchonas,’ boob jobs and bulletproof vests
Still, not all narco-wives dive head-first into the cartel enterprise.
One of essentially the most stereotypical perceptions of a narco-wife is that of a “buchona,” a slang time period from Sinaloa in northwest Mexico that refers to the romantic companions of cartel bosses and conjures up photographs of “plastic surgery, diamond-encrusted nails and Instagram,” based on journalist and writer Ioan Grillo, who stories on crime and medicines in Latin America.
One of essentially the most well-known buchonas is perhaps California-born former magnificence queen Emma Coronel Aispuro, the spouse of infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Since 2019, he has been serving a life sentence at a maximum security jail in Colorado.
Coronel, who met her husband at a celebration in 2006 when she was 17 years outdated – 32 years his junior – and married him a yr later, is now most identified for her modeling profession. She has walked the runway at Milan Fashion week, appeared in a music video, and modeled for numerous manufacturers. She has additionally change into an influencer of types, with over 500,000 followers on Instagram, and has launched a health enterprise, promoting a information detailing meal plans and exercise routines for women.
She has downplayed any involvement in her husband’s line of work. In November, she instructed an Oxygen True Crime documentary that she didn’t ask him about his staggering fortune (estimated by Forbes in 2009 at $1 billion) “because of my lack of experience or perhaps out of convenience.”
However, in 2021, Coronel was arrested in Virginia and sentenced to 3 years in jail and 4 years of supervised launch after pleading guilty to cash laundering and federal drug trafficking charges associated to her husband’s narcotic empire.
Even so, Bonello says Coronel’s comparatively low-level involvement within the cartel contrasts with the central roles performed by different women.
Often, they transfer and function like businesswomen, largely not like their male counterparts, and are proud to take action.
“Women who are leaders of the organizations will say, ‘I’m a boss, I’m not a buchona’,” notes Carey, the historian.
She says one Sinaloan narca has instructed her: “I’m not going to have a boob job, because to customize a bulletproof vest is very, very expensive.”