When we think about the war on drugs,
we tend to think of one group of people in particular—
men.
Drug bosses are almost by definition male.
The picture is usually of male cops chasing male dealers
or male kingpins making billions and buying themselves hippos,
but this leaves out very important rising trends of this global story.
The recent release of Marllory Chacón,
known as The Queen of the South,
has left many wondering how she managed
to reduce her sentence from 26 years in prison to five years.
In this episode, we’re looking at some of
the most important female drug trafficking bosses in Latin America
and how they are and aren’t representative of
how the war on drugs affects women in the region.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[FEMALE DRUG BOSSES]
The tiny town El Espiritu
sits on the border between Honduras and Guatemala.
Though home to only around 3,000 people,
this remote settlement has long been a key node
on the cocaine superhighway connecting Central America
to Mexico and the US.
And for decades,
El Espiritu was run by the Valle drug trafficking syndicate
and, amongst others, by its feared matriarch, Digna Valle.
My name is Deborah Bonello.
I recently put out a series of stories for VICE World News
on a number of women who have very high-ranking positions
in the cartels across Latin America.
I had asked Digna for an interview two or three times,
and she’d said no.
All the times I asked her, she said no.
So I figured, “Oh, I’ll go to her hometown and ask around about her.”
But there we were greeted by her next door neighbors,
and suddenly they had Digna on video,
saying, “Oh, you want to speak to Doña Digna?
Well, here she is.”
And she was sitting on the end of a bed in Houston,
asking me what I was doing there.
The Valle family started off as cattle rustlers and smugglers
but made their true fortune when they switched to cocaine trafficking
during the 1980s and 90s.
US authorities claimed that, at their height,
they were moving tens of thousands of dollars of coke
over the border every month,
making up to $800,000 on a single shipment.
The Valles worked directly with El Chapo Guzmán
of the Sinaloa Cartel,
who was a semi-regular visitor to El Espiritu.
And, unusually for a drug cartel,
a lot of the trafficking activity was overseen by Digna.
Along with her brothers, she was both feared and respected in El Espiritu.
Many of the border regions in Latin America are very lawless
and are characterized by an absence of the state,
so you have families like the Valle Cartel
sort of being these alternative powers
and creating their own kind of governance.
Digna and her family
contributed to the building of this massive Catholic church
in the middle of El Espiritu.
But of course, those sorts of contributions come at a price,
so they expect your complete loyalty in return for that.
If the Valle family ever felt that that loyalty was not honored,
they would often send out people to kill villagers
that they didn’t think were on side.
This all came crashing down in July of 2014,
when Digna was arrested at Miami airport.
In revenge for her arrest,
Digna’s brothers literally took out a hit on the president of Honduras,
Juan Orlando Hernández.
He promised to protect the Valle clan from arrest,
and they were furious when Digna was taken into custody.
But the assassination was foiled
thanks to a tip received by US intelligence.
When she was taken into custody,
a few months later, her brothers were arrested,
so she was pretty fundamental in bringing down her entire clan.
Digna was the first one to fall,
and then after her, it was a dominoes game.
But of course, moving $800,000 shipments of blow
is not the experience of the vast majority
of women in the cocaine business.
We’re poor, we just grow the coca leaf
and sell it in order to sustain our families and educate our children.
They say that we’ll get support in order to stop growing coca,
but what support have we seen?
Nothing. No support for us.
Most women involved in cocaine production
are at the very low end of the supply chain,
doing backbreaking work harvesting coca leaves and opium gum
for a subsistence income.
One woman who definitely did make it to the very top of the drug trade
was Marllory Chacón Rossell.
Rossell came to the drug trade not through the product itself
but through the money.
She was one of Central America’s top money launderers,
with the DEA estimating that she cleaned some $10 million a month
for various Latin American cartels.
She was one of the few women who was decidedly middle class.
I spoke to a former DEA agent,
and he said that had Marllory been in the legal world,
she could have reached CEO position in some big company,
that she was very astute and had very high-end skills,
and it just so happens that she decided to apply those
in the drug trade instead.
In the meantime, she cultivated contacts and protection
at the very top end of the Guatemalan government.
Marllory was incredibly valuable to the DEA.
And when they sanctioned her,
she realized that if she wanted to stay out of prison
for the rest of her life,
she was going to have to cooperate substantially.
She was part of this web
that went right to the top of Guatemala’s political
as well as criminal elite.
She was absolutely right in the eye of the storm.
When she found out the DEA had been tracking her,
Rossell is thought to have flipped,
helping American authorities take down the rest of her network.
The former vice president
and former interior minister of Guatemala
have both been indicted in connection to Rossell,
indicating just how high up her corrupt political connections went.
Chacón’s testimonies were used to prosecute and convict
several people accused of drug trafficking and money laundering,
including the Lorenzana businessmen of Guatemala.
But of course, not every female drug trafficker
is able to strike deals with the DEA.
In fact, women in Latin America
are disproportionately targeted by police
and disproportionately imprisoned
for what tend to be minor roles in the drug trade.
According to informants we have in the sector,
many women, unfortunately due to the country’s economic situation,
have become involved in working as informants
for the gangs or selling drugs.
Across the globe, more men than women are in prison.
But female imprisonment is growing disproportionately,
rising by over 50 percent from 2000 to 2017.
And in Latin America, the figures are almost unbelievable.
In El Salvador over that period,
female imprisonment increased by an insane 644.2 percent,
and the vast majority of those women
are imprisoned for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses.
The region's jails are full of women who have been incarcerated
on fairly minor offenses.
Very often, they’re sent with small amounts of drugs,
and they’re pulled over by the army and arrested.
But they’re very often distraction.
The army needs to show that they’re arresting people,
and once those women are caught,
much bigger bulk loads of coke are let through.
Latin America is a dangerous place to be a woman.
Of the 25 countries across the world with the highest rates of femicide
14 lie in this region.
And the rates of violence against women
tend to almost exactly track the progress of the war on drugs.
Here in Choloma, women get murdered during the day, not at night.
They cut their arms,
they peel their skin like vegetables,
take off the flesh, the head there, the arms over there, everywhere.
There were over 50,000 women murdered in Mexico between 1985 and 2017,
but over a third of those murders happened in just six years.
That stark rise came in the wake of Mexico’s then president
declaring a full-scale war on drug cartels in 2006.
I think the war on drugs in Latin America
is being waged by police forces
that are simply not equipped to do that job.
Corruption is endemic, the levels of training are very poor,
and so you have the police and the military
involved in some of the worst human rights atrocities
that the region sees.
And it just contributes to this culture of impunity,
where the security forces can treat people, men and women,
however they please,
and there's very little comeback for them.
How many women have you killed?
A lot.
Around 15, 20.
I don’t know. I’ve never counted them.
I mean, the frequency at which you’re doing this
suggests that you don’t really have much faith in the justice system
to catch you or to punish you.
Is that fair?
I know that if a police officer catches me with my gun,
I’d give him the money and be freed.
There is a lot of corruption here.
Even more disturbing is that police themselves
have been accused of countless cases of torture, rape, and femicide,
all while supposedly fighting the war on drugs.
In the war on drugs, pretty much everyone ends up losing.
But in Latin America, the drug war has coincided with
a scale of suffering for women that is truly grotesque.
She was murdered here in Rivera Hernandez.
She had a boyfriend who belonged to a local criminal network.
One day, he asked her to come here.
One day later, on the 6th, we found her beheaded.
A few women have managed to climb to the highest level of the drug trade.
But for the vast majority,
the war on drugs has meant poverty, violence, abuse, and murder.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.