The Audacity Of Dope

Across the country, more young women are taking such precautions as the drug war infiltrates every corner of society. Reports of drug traffickers taking their pick of local girls at clubs in the southeastern city of Villahermosa in the fall prompted many young women there to forgo the nightlife altogether and resulted in the closure of several clubs, residents say.

Erendira Álvarez, a 25-year-old from Guadalajara who studies law in Mexico City, works as a stripper to raise extra cash. She travels all over Mexico during her vacations, from working-class Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the south to wealthy Monterrey in the north, often hanging out and working in unsavory circles. She knows the risks, and so do her parents. "They don't mind what I do, and I keep in touch regularly," she says. "But they won't let me go to Tijuana, or Ciudad Juárez. It's a real problem we have here."

Álvarez says she has been approached by lower-level drug traffickers in cities like Monterrey and Culiacán. She dreads to think what might have happened if they'd taken a serious liking to her, as some foreign customers have done in the past. "[The foreigners] wanted to buy me, but even though I work as a stripper, I have rights," she says. "I don't know if a narco would have walked away so easily, or respected those rights."

At a bar in Morelia on a recent busy Saturday night, surrounded by three girlfriends and one male friend, Sánchez García downplayed the outrage and shock over Miss Sinaloa's arrest. Drug traffickers have simply become a fact of life, she said, and so has lying in order to enjoy oneself. "We lie to our parents all the time—we say we're going to a friends' house, going shopping," she said. "The beauty queen lie wasn't surprising. What, you're going to tell your parents that you're hanging out at a hotel in Guadalajara with tons of cocaine, alcohol and these chavos [guys]?"

Her friend, 21-year-old Martha Hernández, agreed. "Look, everywhere, in any city, there's the good crowd and bad crowd. Sometimes they mix—politicians, lawyers, drug traffickers, beauty queens … it's a melting pot," she said. Their male friend, Hernán García, wasn't quite so flippant. Normally, going out with the girls and looking out for them is fine, he said—he does his best to stave off any undesirable characters. But he knows that some things are out of his control. "If a narco comes up and says, 'You're hot,' you know you're f--ked."

Malcolm Beith is the Mexico editor at The News in Mexico City

© 2009