Sandra Avila, known as the "Queen of the Pacific," one of its most notorious and glamorous drug smugglers, Mexican officials said on Tuesday.
Avila, 45, is accused of helping build up the Sinaloa cartel on Mexico's Pacific Coast in the 1990s using her friendships with the gang's leaders including Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's most wanted man.
She was caught in September near her house in the Mexican capital, after a U.S. and Mexican authorities called for her arrest on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.Avila Beltrán is the niece of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, the onetime godfather of the Mexican drug trade who is serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1984. Her great uncle Juan José Quintero Payán was extradited to the States on drug trafficking charges in January. On her mother’s side, the Beltráns got involved in heroin smuggling in the 1970s and later diversified into cocaine as the U.S. market for that drug exploded,Avila Beltrán’s love life was also a key factor in her allegedly meteoric ascent. In the late 1990s she became involved with Colombian trafficker Juan Diego Espinoza Ramírez and through him met Diego Montoya, the head of Colombia’s Valle del Norte cartel who was arrested by the authorities in that country last month. Avila Beltrán became a kind of "transmission belt" between Montoya’s syndicate and Mexican cartels based in the state of Sinaloa, on the Pacific Coast, and Ciudad Juárez, along the U.S. border, says Patiño. Avila Beltrán moved money between the two countries and organized logistics for the safe delivery of cocaine shipments from Colombia. Her underworld godfather, according to Patiño, was the formidable Sinaloa-based trafficker Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington four years ago on charges of conspiring to import and distribute 2,796 kilos of cocaine with an estimated value of $47.4 million.
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