Girls gone wild

MEXICO CITY, Sept 28 (Reuters) – Mexican police have captured Sandra Avila, known as the “Queen of the Pacific,” one of Mexico’s highest profile woman drug smugglers, the government said on Friday.

Avila, 45, helped build up the Sinaloa cartel on Mexico’s Pacific Coast in the 1990s via her friendships with the gang’s leaders including Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, Mexico’s most wanted man.

She was caught alone driving a BMW sport utility vehicle near her house in the Mexican capital, intelligence officials told a news conference.

Police also captured Avila’s boyfriend Colombian trafficker Juan Diego “The Tiger” Espinosa, who is considered to be a key link between Colombian and Mexican smugglers and is wanted in the United States. Police did not give details of his capture.

Where do we get the silly idea that Mexico is traditionally sexist?   From La Malanche to Sandra Avila, crime has always been an equal opportunity employer.

La Malanche, the turncoat Aztec “princess” (or slave, depending on whose version of history you read) sold out the entire Aztec Empire to Cortes.  She set a high standard for female criminals in Mexico.

Caterina de Erazu, a run-away Spanish nun turned hitwoman in the early 1600s ended her career as an almost respectable Mexican mule train driver, after being personally pardoned by the Pope (Clerics and religious were tried by clerical courts, and no one could figure out what to do with a badass nun, so kept kicking the case to a higher court.  The Pope just found the whole thing fascinating). Caterina, who died following a duel with the husband of a lady whose affections she sought, also seems to have been America’s first bulldyke independent teamster.  Her life story was — as far as we know — the subject of the first novel published in the Americas, back in 1641.

History might have been very different if Carlota de Habsburgo,  instead of her idiotic husband had run the Mexican occupation regime.  That was the opinion of Marschal Bazaine, the head of the French occupation force that had to prop up her husband’s ditzy “Empire.”  Thankfully, Maximiliano gave Carlota the clap and she went totally bonkers.  Otherwise, she might have had the balls to put in place a regime similar to the one her brother, King Leopold II of Belgium, put on the Congo.  Nice family:  the legal term “crimes against humanity” was coined to cover their excesses.

Lola la Chata, an illiterate indigenous woman living in Tepito in the 1930s and 40s, pioneering modern heroin smuggling into the United States.  Lola was quite the (ahem) heroine in her hood, providing employment, scholarships and annual expense-paid pilgrimages to the Virgin of Guadalupe to her  neighbors and associates.  William S. Burroughs, who never met Lola, wrote an appreciation of her in his Mexico City book, Junkie.

In our own time, we have had Ma Bakker who ran a murder for hire operation, “Señora Hoffa”, aka Ester Elba Gordilla and Marta Sahugun de Fox to keep the bad girl tradition alive.

You go, girrrrrls!