Underworld Queenpin

Suspected drug traffickers usually don't look quite like this. But Sandra Avila Beltrán is no run-of-the-mill narco-thug: the 46-year-old brunette was indicted in Florida three years ago on charges of conspiring to import cocaine in connection with a 9.6-ton seizure of the drug in 2001, and her arrest outside a coffee shop in a posh Mexico City neighborhood late last month made headlines because she is one of only two women listed among Mexico's leading drug traffickers. Known as the Queen of the Pacific, Avila Beltrán earned her nickname in part by allegedly helping to develop smuggling routes along Mexico's Pacific Coast for Colombia's Valle del Norte cartel as far back as the 1990s. "It's unheard of in the sense that we haven't seen a woman inside the organized crime cartels reach such an exalted position in decades," Mexico's assistant secretary for public security Patricio Patiño told NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview. "Sandra's rise basically has to do with two circumstances: her ties to a family that has been involved in drug trafficking over three generations, and a physical beauty that made her stand out as a woman."

Family connections have certainly played a major role in the saga of Mexico's reigning drug queenpin. Officials in that country say Avila Beltrán is the niece of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, the onetime godfather of the Mexican drug trade who is serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1984. Her great uncle Juan José Quintero Payán was extradited to the States on drug trafficking charges in January. On her mother's side, the Beltráns got involved in heroin smuggling in the 1970s and later diversified into cocaine as the U.S. market for that drug exploded, according to Michael Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Vigil, who spent 17 years investigating Mexican narcos, says Avila Beltrán never shrank from employing the violence that comes with the turf. "Sandra was very ruthless," says Vigil, who is now retired. "She used the typical intimidation tactics of Mexican organizations."

But it would be wrong to view Avila Beltrán as an isolated case. Growing numbers of women are getting involved in the male-dominated illicit narcotics industry. In Brazil, where more cocaine is consumed than anywhere else in the Americas besides the U.S., an estimated 10,000 women are doing time for drug smuggling. And not all are low-level "mules" like the title character of the award-winning 2004 movie "María Full of Grace," played by Catalina Sandino Moreno. Some of the women who have moved up the food chain are frequently given responsibility for money and accounting matters, says one expert. "Before, we [judges] assumed that the only role women play in crime was as victims," says Denise Frossard, a prominent criminal judge in Brazil and author of the recently published book "Women in the Mafia." "Now they are increasingly heading criminal operations, and drug trafficking is becoming more and more female all the time."

In a number of instances, women have been promoted to positions of greater responsibility because their husbands, brothers or boyfriends have been put out of commission by death or detention. That is true of Mexico's other prominent drug mafiosa, Enedina Arellano Félix, a distant relative of Avila Beltrán's who has allegedly taken over the reins of her family's cartel after Enedina's brother Ramón was killed in a police shootout in the Mexican port of Mazatlán five years ago and two other brothers were captured in separate incidents.

Avila Beltrán's love life was also a key factor in her allegedly meteoric ascent. In the late 1990s she became involved with Colombian trafficker Juan Diego Espinoza Ramírez and through him met Diego Montoya, the head of Colombia's Valle del Norte cartel who was arrested by the authorities in that country last month. Avila Beltrán became a kind of "transmission belt" between Montoya's syndicate and Mexican cartels based in the state of Sinaloa, on the Pacific Coast, and Ciudad Juárez, along the U.S. border, says Patiño. Avila Beltrán moved money between the two countries and organized logistics for the safe delivery of cocaine shipments from Colombia. Her underworld godfather, according to Patiño, was the formidable Sinaloa-based trafficker Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington four years ago on charges of conspiring to import and distribute 2,796 kilos of cocaine with an estimated value of $47.4 million. Avila Beltrán had a brief affair with Zambada after she took up with Espinoza Ramírez, says former DEA official Vigil, and she also worked with other Sinaloa-based syndicates loosely grouped under the so-called Federación alliance. "She was very well tutored by her Colombian boyfriend, and he gave her a lot of latitude on the coordination and smuggling of drugs across the U.S. border," notes Vigil. "Sandra is attractive and charming and was able to develop a lot of political contacts [inside Mexico], and as an individual she provided tremendous assistance to Espinoza Ramírez's Colombian colleagues."

The fetching native of the border city of Tijuana has also played both sides of the aisle. Avila Beltrán's first husband was a crooked commander of the Mexican federal judicial police named José Luis Fuentes, and she bore him at least one son. It was Fuentes who coined the sobriquet "My Queen," Avila Beltrán told authorities after her arrest; the Mexican cop used his proceeds from the drug trade to send his wife on clothing and jewelry shopping sprees in Paris and the United States and to buy her seafront condominiums in Puerto Vallarta and other Pacific Coast resort towns. Fuentes was later killed by some of his ex-colleagues from the federal judicial police in the Sinaloa town of Navolato, and Avila Beltrán's next husband, Rodolfo López Amavizca, was another corrupt official of the country's law enforcement agencies. Then head of Mexico's National Institute for Combating Drugs, López Amavizca was with Avila Beltrán for only a brief time in the mid-1990s; he was later murdered in a hotel room in the northern city of Hermosillo by suspected narcos in 2000.