2 cases tagged “cartel women”
Alleged Offender: Claudia Berenice Ochoa Félix
In May 2014, a young woman named Yuriana Castillo Torres was kidnapped off the streets of Culiacán, Sinaloa, and murdered. The men who took her believed she was someone else: a glamorous social media star whose physical resemblance to Kim Kardashian had made her the most-talked-about woman in the narco underworld. The intended target, Claudia Ochoa Félix, was alive. For now. She had been born into the capital of Mexico's deadliest cartel territory, married a Sinaloa Cartel lieutenant, survived a car crash that killed her boyfriend, and allegedly fallen in love with the man who commanded the cartel's most feared assassination squad. By 2014, her Instagram account was a fever dream of gold-plated rifles, stacks of cash, and designer everything, and the world had decided she was the 'Empress of the Ántrax.' She said it was all lies. Mexican authorities said she was never under investigation. A respected journalist who knew the cartel better than almost anyone agreed she showed no signs of actual membership. Then, on a September morning in 2019, she was found dead in a private residence in her hometown. She was 32. The cause was accidental. Some people never believed it.
Convicted: Sandra Ávila Beltrán
When federal agents swarmed a Mexico City restaurant on September 28, 2007, and placed Sandra Ávila Beltrán under arrest, she did not flinch. She smiled. Then she asked if she could freshen her makeup before the cameras filmed her. It was the kind of composure that takes a lifetime to cultivate, and Sandra's lifetime had been extraordinary preparation. Born into one of Mexico's most storied narco dynasties, niece of Guadalajara Cartel godfather Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, she had watched the drug trade operate from her cradle. She had buried two husbands, both former police commanders turned traffickers, both killed by hired assassins. She had allegedly coordinated a 9.5-ton cocaine shipment and paid millions in ransom when her own son was kidnapped. By the time the agents clicked the handcuffs, she had already become a legend: La Reina del Pacífico. The Queen of the Pacific. What followed her arrest was almost as astonishing as the life that preceded it. This is the true story of the most glamorous and dangerous woman in the history of the Mexican drug war.
