ZeroZeroZero (39 page)

If the ex–police officer hadn’t been drunk that day, if he hadn’t told a bunch of lies, would Christian still be alive? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they would have eliminated him just the same, because some of the gang members were unhappy with how Christian had portrayed them in his film. Despite his assurances that the documentary would not be released in El Salvador, some pirated versions were making the rounds. Maybe they would have killed him anyway, because the new generation of Mara 18 leadership was even more violent and ferocious than the previous one. According to Carole Solive, Christian’s French producer, his mistake was to stay on in El Salvador after he’d finished shooting. Maybe he’d come to know too much about the negotiations between Salvatrucha and 18, two rival bands that were trying to reach an understanding, and that knowledge condemned him to death. No matter how much he trusted those kids Christian never forgot to take certain basic safety precautions. He had a cell phone that he used only to contact maras members. But it wasn’t enough.

Christian Poveda believed in the power of images to influence events. That’s why he worked as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. He devoted all his efforts to chronicling extraordinary political and social situations, making sixteen documentaries that were well received at the world’s most prestigious film festivals. I often look for
La vida loca
when I’m in a bookstore, or when I go to someone’s home, in the stacks of DVDs next to the TV. I almost never find it. What did you die for, Christian? The question rises up in me like some
melodramatic lullaby. What did you die for? Would your life have made more sense if that documentary were in every home? I don’t think so. No work of art can make sense of or justify death with a gun to your head. Your last words are more eloquent than any epigraph could be: “Government authorities have no idea of the monster facing them. Now the 18 is full of crazy people. I am very worried . . . and sad.”

Writing about cocaine is not so different from using it. You always want more—more news, more information—and the stuff you do find is so potent you can’t live without it. It’s addicting. These stories, even when they conform to an overarching plot you’ve already grasped, continue to fascinate in their particulars. And they stick in your head until another one—incredible but true—takes its place. You see that your stimulation threshold is on the rise, and you pray you don’t ever go into withdrawal. Which is why I keep collecting stories ad nauseam, more than are needed; I can’t bring myself to stop. One evening, long before El Chapo’s actual capture, I got a phone call from Guatemala with the news that he was killed in a shootout. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not; it wouldn’t be the first time that false information about drug lords was circulated. Still, these bits of information roar in my ear. But relatively few others hear the noise. The further I descend into these infernal circles whitewashed with cocaine, the more I realize how much people don’t know. There’s a river that runs under big cities, a river that starts in South America, flows through Africa, and spreads everywhere. Men and women stroll down Rome’s via del Corso, along Parisian
boulevards, meet up in Times Square, walk with heads lowered along London streets. Don’t they hear anything? How can they stand all this noise?

That old story of Griselda, for example, the most ruthless female narco of all the Colombian drug traffickers. As a child she learned that all men are means, tools to manipulate so as to reach your goals. A reasonable theory if you grow up with a mother who got pregnant by a half-Indian
guajiro
landowner called Señor Blanco, who threw her out on the street as soon as the baby was born. An alcoholic, poor, abused, and desperate, Griselda’s mother dragged her daughter through the putrid streets of Medellín, forcing her to beg. A couple of miserable, human beggars who’d part ways only when the mother got herself pregnant by the umpteenth guy she’d picked up who knows where, only to join up later, now with the addition of a half brother or sister. These are the years of La Violencia in Colombia. Brutality is the order of the day, and if you want to survive, you have to be brutal too. Griselda turns thirteen, she starts to prostitute herself. The men she goes with are pieces of meat who vent themselves on her body, and who pay her just enough to get by till the next day. Her amber skin collects bruises and cuts, bites and scars. They don’t hurt, though; they’re just nicks on her thick armor. Men are a means. Nothing more. Griselda learns the art of pickpocketing to round out her income. She’s quick with her hands and doesn’t permit herself to steal from her clients, because she doesn’t want to risk ruining her beat. For her love is a foul-smelling bed she lies on, waiting while the sweaty creature on top of her does his duty. But one day she meets Carlos. Another man, one of many, and Griselda gives him the usual treatment: indifference. Carlos is a small-time criminal in Medellín, an expert pickpocket and thief who has a thriving partnership with a narco named Alberto Bravo. A long courtship begins between Griselda and Carlos. He brings her a different flower every day, which every day she throws away after accepting it with false courtesy. She never looks him in the eye, but he, unperturbed, makes the rounds of all the florists in Medellín, looking for different varieties.
He teaches her a few tricks to make ends meet; she pretends not to listen but is actually memorizing everything he says. This skirmish lasts a long time, until Carlos’s stubborn perseverance breaks through, and Griselda surrenders. For the first time in her life a man has shown her that a relationship does not necessarily have to expire, that there exists a word she has never heard before: trust. They get married, they love each other, they make big plans. He introduces her to Alberto Bravo, who makes her see that the real money is in narco-trafficking. She is young but quick-witted, and doesn’t hesitate to set foot in that world. And besides, she has Carlos, who always says yes whenever she asks him if they will be together their whole lives. They move to New York, to Queens, where Colombians are starting to settle and the drug market is really flourishing. A new life. The city that never sleeps welcomes Griselda and Carlos like royalty. Things are going really well, and Carlos keeps saying yes whenever Griselda asks him: “Will we be together our whole lives?” Yes, yes, yes. But then Carlos gets sick—cirrhosis of the liver—and dies in the hospital. Griselda stays at his side till the end, and when her husband dies she doesn’t feel a thing, just as she used to feel nothing when she came home after a long night working and counted her new bites and scars in the mirror. Carlos didn’t honor their pact to stay together their whole lives; Carlos is just like every other man; men are a means.

She marries Alberto Bravo, but when he goes to Colombia on a work trip and she doesn’t hear from him for a while, a furious Griselda catches up with him and kills him in a shootout. By 1971 Griselda has her own narco-trafficking network in the United States. She has understood that the line connecting New York, Miami, and Colombia is the future. She has a lingerie shop in Medellín, where she sells her own designs, which she also has her mules wear. They’re the ones who hide 2 kilos of cocaine under their clothes on the Colombia–United States flight. Her name appears in the DEA files for the first time in 1973. She’s described as “a new threat for the United States.” Business is booming; she’s now one of the most important Colombian traffickers.
Despite being a woman—no small handicap in a society where there’s no feminine version of the word “narco-trafficker”—Griselda proves to her Colombian colleagues that she can do the job and do it with such violence that she terrorizes people. Her reputation as a wicked woman without scruples precedes her everywhere she goes.

In 1975 she is accused of drug trafficking as part of an investigation in New York, but she manages to take refuge in Colombia. She has already amassed a fortune, $500 million. She returns to the United States a few years later, when things have calmed down, this time to Florida. She founds the Pistoleros, her own army of killers. Among them is Paco Sepúlveda, who slits his victims’ throats and then hangs them upside down until the blood has drained out: “The bodies are lighter that way, and it’s easier to move them.”

The stories about Griselda multiply: hypochondriac, druggie, bisexual, lover of orgies, paranoid, collector of luxury goods. Along with the rumors that feed the myth, Griselda starts collecting nicknames: Godmother, the Queen of Cocaine in Miami, the Black Widow. It’s rumored that she slit the throat of some men she’d gone to bed with. She gets married four times, always to narco-traffickers. Marriage is a lever for moving up in the hierarchy of power, and when a husband puts a spoke in her wheels, she has him eliminated. Like Dario Sepúlveda, who contests the custody agreement for their son, whom they named, of all things, Michael Corleone, and so she has him killed.

Griselda’s drug empire in Miami takes in $8 million a month. She plays a fundamental role in what will be called the Florida Cocaine War, also known as the Cocaine Cowboys War. Miami is flooded in money, estimated at about $10 billion a year.

In 1979 Griselda orchestrates the Dadeland Mall massacre. Two people are killed in a liquor store in that Dade County mall: Germán Jiménez Panesso, a Colombian drug trafficker who does business with Griselda’s organization, and who is the target of the shootout, and his bodyguard. In the 1970s homicides were a private matter. Sure, there were tortures, stranglings, mutilations, decapitations. But they were
ways to settle the score. The Dadeland massacre signals instead the beginning of a long series of shootouts in Miami, of battles fought in public places, in the light of day. So-called collateral damage doesn’t matter anymore. Now people are shot in the street, in shopping malls, stores, restaurants, crowded locales at the busiest times of day. It is said that Griselda is responsible for the majority of murders committed in southern Florida during that time.

Griselda’s ruthlessness reaches epic proportions. Numerous episodes, told as if part of a legend, are passed from one person to the next.

Griselda walks into a bar just for men. Girls are dancing provocatively on their platforms. All heads turn to look at her. A woman who comes into a place like this? Unheard of. What’s more, a woman who looks like that: stoned, slovenly, haunted eyes. She sits down, orders a drink, observes the gyrating bodies. She seems about to touch those long legs. Then all of a sudden she gets up and fires a gun. One by one the girls fall to the ground. “Whores!” she screams. “Whores! All you know how to do is wiggle your asses for the men.” Griselda is obsessed with those women. For her they don’t deserve to live. Another obsession is hunting in bars. She liked to choose her men, and if they didn’t go along, they were dead. One time a kid, younger than her, sitting a few tables away, attracts her attention. Griselda wants him and fixes her eyes on him. He avoids her gaze, but Griselda insists. So the kid heads to the bathroom, and she follows, going into the women’s room. “Help!” she starts screaming. “Help!” and the kid comes running; maybe that weird woman is sick. Griselda is waiting for him, naked from the waist down. “Lick me,” she commands. The kid steps away, his back to the door, but Griselda takes out a pistol and repeats, “lick me.” So he does, the barrel of her gun glued to his head.

Griselda holes up in her bedroom, looked after by her German shepherd, Hitler; she’s a drug addict by this point. Drugs and the police are only two of her enemies. Rival organizations try to kill her several times. On one occasion she tricks her killers by staging her own death: She ships an empty coffin to Colombia from the United States. In
1984, to escape the continual attacks, she moves her base to Irvine, California, where she lives with her youngest son, the aforementioned Michael Corleone. But she is arrested in February 1985, right in Irvine, accused of drug trafficking by the DEA. She is sentenced to ten years in prison, but even as an inmate she continues to manage her affairs. The Godmother buys herself a luxury prison. From behind bars she comes up with new projects, such as the one—aborted, thanks to wiretappings—to kidnap John F. Kennedy, Jr. In prison she receives jewels, perfume, men.

The Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney pressures one of her right-hand men, Jorge “Riverito” Ayala, to collaborate, and in 1993 he agrees. They gather sufficient proof to incriminate Griselda for multiple homicide. But it’s 1998, and the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney is about to be buried in scandal. The man who turned on Griselda is in a witness protection program. He can’t take it anymore. The life of luxury and drugs he’d been used to is now just a distant memory, and all the discipline is killing him. He finds a way to put a lot of money into the hands of the DA secretaries. He doesn’t want information or cocaine or an escape plan. The money is for sex. Telephone sex, but for him it’s still sex. The heavy breathing and moans go on for a while, but in the end an inquiry uncovers the secret hotline, and the DA’s authority is undermined. The scandal saves Griselda, who escapes the electric chair as a result. She is freed on June 6, 2004, after almost twenty years in prison, and sent back to Colombia.

September 3, 2012: Griselda, now sixty-nine, is coming out of a butcher shop in Medellín with a friend. Two men on a motorcycle pull up and shoot her twice in the head. The Godmother dies in the hospital a few hours later, killed via the same technique—motorcycle murder—that she herself imported to Miami.

Or take the story of another woman, Mexican this time: Sandra Ávila Beltrán, queen of cocaine. And a sentence I couldn’t get out of my head: “The world is disgusting.” Sandra couldn’t stand hearing that sentence. And if it was uttered by one of her uncle’s men, who was none
other than El Padrino Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Sandra felt the blood rush to her head and pound against her temples. Born into a narco family, raised in the presence of the greatest of them all, immersed in a macho culture since she was a little girl: How could it be that those same men who boasted in front of her uncle about their female conquests and their barbaric slayings of enemies, amongst themselves then would say “The world is disgusting”? Braggarts in front of the boss, cowards as soon as he turned his back. And if little Sandra happened to hear them, well, it really didn’t matter much; she was just a girl.

Education is often the drop of water that wears away the stone. Patient and tenacious, El Padrino’s lackeys’ words dig into Sandra’s conscience. They make their way deep down, creating an emptiness that can no longer be resolved with simple rage. She has to look for other answers. She has to find a lifestyle that contradicts that inescapable sentence. Sandra divides the world into two categories. On one side are people like her uncle’s men. On the other are those who want to change the world, to win. She can boast of her birthright, the ideal genetic résumé for a narco-trafficker. But she’s a woman; her body bears the indelible mark of the ineptness of command. Breasts, wide hips, an ass like a mandolin. These things can’t be erased, can’t be passed off as something else. So breasts, wide hips, and mandolin ass become weapons to hone, things she can depend on: fingernails, shoes, hair, perfume, clothes. For Sandra they are all necessary to make her femininity—her sensuality and power—explode. Because the more woman she is, the more the men are going to have to pay attention to her. The very logic that is used against her, to subjugate her femininity, she will bend to her advantage, and will teach all women that there is another way to live in the world.

Men are pawns, to be classified by their usefulness. Sandra gets sentimentally attached to two federal judicial police commanders, long a breeding ground for narcos. Then she moves on to seducing important Sinaloa bosses such as El Mayo Zambada and Ignacio “Nacho”
Coronel. And finally the big coup: She gets engaged to Juan Diego Espinoza Ramírez, known as El Tigre, or the Tiger. Diego is a Colombian narco belonging to the Norte del Valle cartel and the nephew of Don Diego, the famous narco Diego Montoya. Sandra is a princess, constantly choosing whom to tie herself to so as to rise in power and social standing. With El Tigre she makes a qualitative leap that allows her to negotiate directly with the Colombian suppliers. So Sandra, El Padrino’s niece, becomes la Reina, the Queen. The Queen of the Pacific knows how to exploit clichés. A woman is weak, so there’s no point in threatening her: For the Queen this means freedom of movement. A woman doesn’t know how to negotiate with men: The Queen takes advantage of the cartel emissaries’ embarrassment when faced with a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress.