Narcas

Most accounts of Latin America's drug trade focus on men such as Pablo Escobar, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Rafael Caro Quintero, and they tend to leave behind images of gunfire, narcotics and a brutal, male-dominated code. This book turns to the women who sit inside those organizations, known as las narcas. Its author, Deborah Bonello, is a VICE journalist and investigative reporter whose work draws on time spent in the field.

Bonello looks past the familiar picture to introduce the women who run organized crime south of the US-Mexico border. Some drive violent cartels, some design extortion schemes, some serve as trusted aides to El Chapo and oversee the cocaine shipments headed to the United States, and others act as matriarchs of trafficking families. Among them are Doña Digna, head of the Valle cartel, and Guadalupe Fernandez Valencia, one of Guzman's closest confidants.

The book is presented as the first in-depth study of this subject. It records the wide range of roles these women fill and the tangled mix of motives and conduct behind them, including the blurry boundary between those who are coerced and those who choose their path, and between wrongdoing and what they believe is right. Bonello also asks why women's part in the trade has been so under-reported, and she argues that they should be understood as fully capable people, as ambitious, inventive, ruthless and violent as the men beside them.

The women profiled here are not the stock figures of glamorous narco wives and girlfriends, such as Emma Coronel Aispuro, nor are they trafficking survivors or drug mules. Sebastiana Cottón and Marixa Lemus are among those who appear in the book. Readers meet, in large numbers, women who kill, launder money, direct logistics and move product for Latin America's crime syndicates.