“The government associates me with the bosses as if I were one of them, but I met them when they were ordinary people,” he declared. Sandra Avila Beltran in The Queen of the Pacific: it’s time to tell, book by journalist Julio Scherer García. Among her words, the influence that this woman managed to consolidate in the most powerful circles of cocaine trafficking is filtered.
Due to her image as a powerful woman within the Mexican narco, different literary and television narratives have emerged. The most outstanding is “The Queen of the South” series of Telemundo that it used without consent the images of the arrest of Sandra Ávila Beltrán that occurred in September 2007, as determined by the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI). This lawsuit is still in process and there could be talk of a compensation of 150 million dollars for her.
At 63 years old, she flaunts the same glamor of her luxury days with which she has achieved 260,000 followers on her TikTok account @sandraavilaoficial, recently created in June 2022. The lifestyle she shows on this social network recalls a time of rise in it organized crime until the decline that led her to spend three years in prisons in the US and Mexico.
“I’m the real one, the real one,” she said in a TikTok video with which she announced her arrival on social media after serving time in prison. The woman became one of the most iconic figures in the world of drug trafficking after having cooperated in cocaine trafficking operations in northern Mexico and being in command of the profits from this illegal market.
Before becoming “the queen of the pacific”, Sandra Ávila Beltrán was born in October 1960, into a family involved with the Guadajalara Cartel. Her father, Alfonso Ávila Quintero, was the founder of the Guadalajara Cartel and her lifestyle opened the doors to the world of financial fraud and business with criminal organizations.
Her glamor gave her away as a relative of drug dealers. She wore thick gold jewelry and necklaces, as she recalled in an interview with BBC a former classmate from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, where Avila Beltran studied Communication Sciences. The suspicions were confirmed when in the 1980s she claimed to be the niece of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, “The Boss of Bosses”, although she denied it when speaking with the journalist Scherer García.
The man who was key to his participation in drug trafficking was his ex-partner Juan Diego Espinosa Ramirez, “El Tigre”, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and second important man in the Valle del Norte Cartel in Colombia. He was in charge of storing cocaine in Guadalajar, where he settled in 1990. One of this man’s coups was sending 40 tons of this drug to USA a month, which was possible with the help of many people, as he stated in an interview with Telemundo. Sandra Ávila Beltrán was involved among those people.
with his intelligence, “Queen of the Pacific” managed the profits obtained in the operations of “El Tigre”. Even in 2007, the Mexican investigative police accused her of trafficking nine tons during 2002, the year in which drug trafficking operated with the greatest presence; however, it was impossible to prove it in front of the courts.
The fact that led her to admit her participation in these crimes was her escape plan for “El Tigre”. She herself has declared before authorities in the United States and Mexico that between 2002 and 2004 she financed her ex-boyfriend so that he could travel and hide in Mexican territory while he was persecuted by the police.
Another key point that positioned the woman within this criminal organization was provided after the investigations of the Drug Control Administration (DEA). In December 2001, a ship named Macel carrying nine tons of cocaine was seized in Mexico. The transport belonged to Juan Diego Espinosa Ramírez and his brother Mauricio Espinosa Ramírez. In the report delivered by the US agency to the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), the name of Sandra Avila Beltran He appeared as one of the ringleaders.
On April 18, 2002, an armed command kidnapped the son of “The Queen of the Pacific”: José Luis Fuentes Ávila, then 15 years old, was kidnapped by someone who had posed as a friend of his own family. Sandra Ávila Beltrán went to the Jalisco State Attorney General’s Office. Noting that the woman herself had the resources to pay the five million dollar ransom, the authorities began to investigate her.
The anti-kidnapping anti-state unit tracked calls from “La Reina del Pacífico” to “El Tigre”, Ignacio Nacho Coronel and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, high-ranking men in organized crime. After 17 days, José Luis Fuentes Ávila was released after the payment that Zambada made: 1.4 million dollars.
It was not until July 17, 2002 that the police and members of the Mexican Army seized a tuna boat “Macel”. With the accusations of the DEA, Mexico detained in February 2007 a Sandra Avila Beltran and “El Tigre” in CDMX. “The Queen of the Pacific” was handed over to the US authorities in compliance with the extradition agreement and, in July 2013, the Federal Court for the Southern District of Florida (USA) handed down a sentence of 70 months in prison. “The Queen of the Pacific” pleaded guilty to helping her ex-partner flee from justice and providing “advice”.
On September 5, 2014, she was sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of one thousand days for being criminally responsible for committing the crime of operations of illegal origin and was detained at the Federal Center for Social Readaptation, in the state of Nayarit, until the night of February 7, 2015, when she was finally released.
