Meet the Queens at the Top of Mexico’s Most Ruthless Drug Cartels | Incels.is

Meet the queens at the top of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels

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Isabel Vincent
June 26, 2021 08:22 AM
Updated

If looks could kill: Emma Coronel Aispuro (left) and Sandra Ávila Beltrán are fierce — and stylish. NY Post photo composite

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The queens of the Mexican drug cartels are fond of tight jeans, red lipstick and stilettos. They have inspired songs and telenovelas. They have nicknames like “The Little Queen” and “The Missus.”
They are as brutal and ruthless as their male counterparts and can wage all-out war against their enemies.
“The cartels used to be a game played only by men, and women were only kept at parties,” security consultant Robert Almonte, an expert on Mexican cartels who trains law enforcement officials, told The Post.
Women have now become a powerful force in one of the world’s largest criminal enterprises, working in all aspects of the cartels, including as female “hitmen” or sicarios.
“The cartels like to use beautiful girls as hitmen to lure their victims,” Almonte said. “And some of them are in important leadership positions.”
Here are four of the highest-ranking Cartel Queens. After two high-profile arrests, these drug kingpins are being tried like their male counterparts — and potentially turning on them…

Emma Coronel AispuroGetty Images

Emma Coronel Aispuro: Mrs. El Chapo

On June 10, Emma Coronel Aispuro, a former beauty queen, pleaded guilty in a federal court in Washington, D.C., to helping Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán — her notorious drug trafficker husband — run his empire, the Sinaloa Cartel. The 31-year-old also admitted to helping Guzmán, who is now serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison, escape from a maximum-security prison in Mexico in 2015.
The California-born woman met her husband at a party thrown by her Mexican-born, drug-dealing father in 2006, when she was 17. A year later, she was crowned Miss Coffee and Guava in Canelas, a city in northwestern Mexico.
The couple announced their plans to marry in the run-up to the pageant, and many have suggested that she won the title due to El Chapo’s influence. Because she appeared at her coronation in a diamond-encrusted crown, El Chapo called her his “little queen.” El Chapo proposed to the beauty queen during the competition, flanked by 100 of his hitmen. They were married on her 18th birthday – July 3, 2007. El Chapo was 50 years old at the time of the ceremony.

Emma Coronel Aispuro as teenage beauty queen and her husband El ChapoREUTERS
The nickname stuck, and she’s since been known as “La Reinita” to her husband’s cartel ally. In 2011, she gave birth to the couple’s twins, Maria and Emali. Three years later, El Chapo, by then one of the world’s top drug lords, was arrested by Mexican authorities for running his drug empire. Coronel Aispuro helped her husband distribute cocaine and pass messages to the cartel while he was in custody in Mexico, the FBI said. She was also a constant presence at his trial in federal court in Brooklyn, which began in November 2018 and ended in February 2019.
Almonte believes that Coronel Aispuro likely gave up information about the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for more lenient treatment. “She will probably have to go into witness protection,” Almonte said. She will likely receive a short sentence if she gives up information about the cartel, and if that happens, her life will be in danger once she is released, he said.

Jessica Oseguera

Jessica Oseguera: ‘La Negra’​

A day after Coronel Aispuro appeared in court, Jessica Oseguera, the 34-year-old daughter of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the boss of El Chapo’s rival cartel, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
She was found guilty of helping her father launder money through several businesses — sushi restaurants, a resort and a tequila company — according to a Justice Department news release.

Oseguera’s father, known as “El Mencho”
Oseguera’s father, known by his underworld nickname “El Mencho,” runs the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s most brutal drug trafficking rings, whose members are known for beheading enemies and dissolving their bodies in acid. El Mencho leads a crew of 5,000 hitmen and is on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most wanted list. The reward for information leading to his capture is $10 million.
Oseguera, who holds dual Mexican and American citizenship, was arrested last year while crossing the border.
Almonte said her “extremely lenient sentence” of two and a half years likely means she provided information about her fugitive father, El Mencho.
“La Negra,” as Oseguera is known, has two young children and desperately wants to be reunited with them. Although she initially insisted she had no involvement in her father’s drug trafficking, she expressed remorse in a letter to the judge.
“I ask for forgiveness and say, without hesitation, that I regret everything I have done that may have caused harm,” Oseguera wrote. “Today, more than ever, it is clear to me that I should have paid more attention to my actions and the consequences of my actions.”

Clara Elena Laborin

Clara Elena Laborín: ‘La Señora’​

In 2016, authorities arrested Clara Elena Laborín, a former beauty queen from the state of Sonora who was married to Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El Chapo’s former partner in the Sinaloa Cartel. Laborín is known as “La Señora” or “The Missus” because her husband treated her like a trophy bride.
In 2008, Beltrán Leyva broke with El Chapo and formed his own cartel after his brother and business partner Alfredo was arrested by Mexican authorities. Beltrán Leyva suspected that El Chapo had ratted out his brother to authorities, so he began a bloody war against the Sinaloa Cartel.

Héctor Beltrán LeyvaZUMAPRESS.com
Laborín was recruited to lead the money laundering arm of her husband’s Beltrán Leyva Cartel. In 2010, she was kidnapped by a rival group and photographed in captivity, blindfolded and tied with her feet and hands, with automatic rifles pointed at her. She was released after 13 days and returned to manage the cartel’s finances.
Four years later, when her husband was arrested, Laborín became the head of the cartel and unleashed one of the bloodiest waves of violence in Acapulco. Her campaign for dominance was brutal, turning the resort town into the murder capital of Mexico. Tourists were caught in the crossfire and forced to step over bullet-riddled bodies on beaches as the Beltrán Leyva Cartel fought their rivals in the Independent Cartel of Acapulco.
Laborín said she is no longer part of the cartel.
“Women in the cartels have shown that they can be just as brutal as some men,” Almonte said.

Sandra Ávila BeltránAP

Sandra Ávila Beltrán: ‘Queen of the Pacific’

The most legendary of the drug kingpins is Sandra Ávila Beltrán, so respected among the cartels that she is known as the “Queen of the Pacific” and about whom the band Los Tigres del Norte wrote a popular “narcocorrido” song in 2004. “The more beautiful the rose, the sharper the thorns,” goes one of the lyrics.
She is also the inspiration for the Mexican telenovela “La Reina del Sur” (“Queen of the South”). Ávila Beltrán earned her nickname by hijacking a fleet of tuna boats—each loaded with 10 tons of cocaine—that were sailing from the port of Manzanillo to California in 2001. Authorities seized some of the cargo, and Ávila Beltrán went underground.
Now 60, Ávila Beltrán was a key link between Mexican drug cartels and Colombian cocaine traffickers, largely due to her romantic relationship with Colombian drug dealer Juan “The Tiger” Diego Espinoza.
Ávila Beltrán, a third-generation drug trafficker born in Baja California, Mexico, is linked through family ties to powerful figures, including Rafael Caro Quintero of the Guadalajara Cartel, and has had affairs with several capos. She also married two police officers who joined the cartels.
Her first husband was killed in a gunfight, her second was stabbed through the heart – both during the Mexican drug wars.

Rafael Caro QuinteroFBI
Ávila Beltrán herself is a sharpshooter who, in her heyday, had no qualms about lugging suitcases full of millions of dollars in $100 bills.
In addition to her favorite tight jeans and stilettos, the raven-haired Ávila Beltrán was known for wearing a gold pendant of King Tutankhamun, set with 83 rubies, 228 diamonds and 189 sapphires. All the while, she continued to insist that she was nothing more than a wealthy housewife in Guadalajara, making a living renting out properties and selling clothes.
She came onto the police radar in 2002 after she paid a $5 million ransom when her teenage son was kidnapped by rival drug traffickers. Police were puzzled by where this humble housewife was getting the money, and Ávila Beltrán—who owned more than 200 properties in Guadalajara—was arrested five years later. She was accused of helping her Colombian boyfriend sell drugs and launder money through a series of tanning salons she owned called Electric Beach.
When she was arrested in the fall of 2007, 30 Mexican federal agents stormed an upscale Mexico City restaurant where she was drinking coffee. Before they took her away, she convinced them to touch up her makeup so she would look good in her arrest photo. In the arrest video, she can be seen flipping her hair back and smiling for the camera.
Even after Ávila Beltrán pleaded guilty — and eventually admitted to U.S. authorities that she had helped her Colombian boyfriend sell drugs — she found the spotlight hard to resist. As she told a judge at one of her first hearings in Mexico, “It’s nice to be called a queen.”
At Santa Martha Acatitla Women’s Prison, she ordered Thai food from a fancy Mexico City restaurant and got Botox injections. When authorities cracked down on her takeout, Ávila Beltrán filed a complaint with the human rights commission. She lost her appeal, and two high-ranking prison officials were fired, according to Mexican news reports.
After serving time in both Mexican and American prisons, she was released in 2015 and currently lives “in peace” in Guadalajara.