An amateur tourniquet draped around her neck, she can be seen sitting slumped in the dust beside a wall, blood dripping from her hand and mouth as she gasps for breath. Glancing up at the officer approaching her, she seems resigned to her fate.
“Calm down, kid,” the officer says. “The helicopter is coming for you. It is coming now, easy, easy, you are going to be OK. Try to hang on.” The woman, though, would later die in hospital.
In scenes doing the rounds on social media, these are the reported last moments of María Guadalupe López Esquivel, known as La Catrina. The 21-year-old cartel leader was killed in Mexico in recent days when her heavily armed group launched a firefight with police, the Daily Mail and various Mexican outlets report.
La Catrina is suspected of being a local boss, in southern Mexico’s Tierra Caliente region, of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, or “El Mencho.” Known by its Spanish initials CJNG, El Mencho’s group is vying for supremacy with the Sinaloa Cartel once led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was sentenced last year to life in prison in the U.S.
Calm down, kid. The helicopter is coming for you.
American authorities have placed a $10 million bounty on El Mencho’s head, with the Justice Department calling the CJNG “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world, responsible for trafficking many tons of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl-laced heroin into the United States, as well as for violence and significant loss of life in Mexico.” The cartel is said to operate in 75 per cent of Mexican states, and to have operations in Europe, Asia and Australia as well as across the Americas.
La Catrina, famed for her Instagram posts boasting of the cartel life, was said to be one of El Mencho’s most important regional lieutenants. Documents seized by authorities indicate she was involved in kidnapping, extortion and other criminal activities, and had herself commanded cartel assassins.
She is reported by U.K. outlet the Express to have fallen in with the cartel after beginning a relationship with a narco known as “M2,” Miguel Fernandez. She reportedly abandoned a sedate family life and her respectable parents to live with M2 and other cartel men in Aguililla, Michoacán, in 2017.
In total, reports indicate six cartel members were captured in the raid that killed her on Friday. The shootout, involving state troops, state police and the National Guard, happened in a village called La Bocanada in Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, according to Mexico News Daily.
Reports vary as to how the shootout started. Some say La Catrina was found at a cartel safe house raided by Mexican troops; others say authorities came under fire when they took apart a roadblock at the town’s entrance. Either way, when the shooting stopped, the woman named after La Catrina, or the Dame of Death — a mythical female skeleton celebrated in Mexico during its famous Day of the Dead festival — was gravely hurt. Reportedly shot through the neck, she would soon die.
In grim footage online La Catrina can be seen being carried to a helicopter, her arm draped around one of the same soldiers she had been battling just moments earlier. A separate circulating clip shows a tattoo on her thigh that reads her nickname: “La Catrina.” In another, she is lying stricken on a stretcher, her jeans and black t-shirt caked in dust and blood.
Local reports indicate that La Catrina’s cartel cell had launched a raid on police in the same part of Michoacán in October that saw 13 officers killed. The Daily Mail reported that footage from that October bloodbath showed policemen riddled with bullets, their vehicles set on fire.
Some reports indicate M2 was arrested in the same raid that killed his girlfriend, with others indicating he escaped. The raid happened in a violent region home to other cartels such as the Knights Templar and the Viagras.
Although it is unusual for women to rise to high rank within drug cartels, it is by no means unheard of. In recent decades, perhaps the most famous female to assume high gangland office was Griselda Blanco of Colombia. Known as the Black Widow, she oversaw her own drugs fiefdom that spanned from Colombia to Miami, beginning in the 1970s, and eventually served 19 years in prison in the U.S. Ironically, Blanco was killed at the age of 69 in 2012 by a sicario or assassin on a motorbike — a style of killing that she herself was rumoured to have first introduced to the streets of her home city of Medellín.
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