Drug lord beauty arrested in Mexico swoop

BLESSED with charm and good looks, Sandra Avila Beltran is enthralling Mexico. Not as a beauty queen, but as an alleged drug lord.

Police say the raven-haired 46-year-old, arrested last week, spent more than a decade working her way to the top of Mexico’s male-dominated drug trade, uniting Colombian and Mexican gangs, and seducing several notorious kingpins.

Dubbed the “Queen of the Pacific” she even has her own folk ballad about drug traffickers by Los Tucanes de Tijuana that pays homage to her as “a top lady who is a key part of the business”.

Avila Beltran lived largely unnoticed in the northern cities of Guadalajara and Hermosillo until 2001. That’s when police found more than nine tonnes of cocaine on a ship in the Pacific port of Manzanillo and tracked the shipment to her and her 39-year-old lover, Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez — known as the Tiger and also wanted by US authorities.

It was her romance with Espinoza Ramirez that brought together two powerful cocaine organisations: Mexico’s Sinaloa gang and Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, prosecutors say. Officials say Avila Beltran was head of “public relations” for the Sinaloa cartel, an unprecedented role for a woman, and as such helped move cocaine from Colombia.

Her success was likely aided by an influential family. She is the niece of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, “the godfather” of Mexican drug smuggling, who is serving a 40-year sentence in Mexico for drug smuggling and the murder of a drug enforcement agent.

Another uncle, Juan Jose Quintero Payan, was extradited to the US last January on drug-trafficking charges, assistant federal public safety secretary Patricio Patino said.

Mexican media said Avila Beltran had love affairs with other drug lords also, which helped catapult her into the elite of drug trafficking. Among the purported lovers were Ismael Zambada, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, and suspected methamphetamine kingpin Ignacio Coronel.

She managed to stay behind the scenes until 2001 when US and Mexican authorities began building a case against her. Officers tracked her to Mexico City.

More than 30 federal agents arrested her on September 28 as she drank a cup of coffee at a diner, but she didn’t lose her poise. She charmed investigators into letting her apply make-up before police videotaped her transfer to a women’s jail.