Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

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.

Now they all have to kneel to her, honor her. She coordinates shipments from Colombia from her luxurious headquarters in Guadalajara and launders the earnings, which get bigger every year. All that money is needed to carry out her most ambitious plan: to give women power. According to the Queen, women need to earn approval and respect, and the fastest, surest way to do that is through beauty. She invests the proceeds from cocaine in beauty clinics, both deluxe and plain, because all women have the right to lovers and husbands, jobs and suitable social standing. It’s tangible things she invests in. Bodies and buildings. Breasts and houses. Derrieres and villas. Smooth skin and apartments. Seated on her throne, Sandra rules an army of men who can climb the ranks only to a certain point, because above them, undisputed, is the silent Queen, who never exposes herself, never gets her hands dirty, does not allow her name to appear in the newspaper or, worse, in police reports.

Then one day everything changes. An important shipment has just arrived in the port of Manzanillo, in the state of Colima, on the Pacific: ten tons of cocaine worth more than $80 million. The authorities block it and seize the drugs. For the first time the Queen’s name appears in the media. She is now a public figure, and it may not be pure coincidence that a few months later her only son, sixteen-year-old José Luis Fuentes Ávila, who lives in the exclusive Puerta de Hierro neighborhood in Guadalajara, is kidnapped. His captors demand $5 million in ransom. The Queen panics. The only man that really matters to her is in the hands of ruthless killers who threaten to skin him alive. She goes to the authorities. But that turns out to be a serious mistake, because from that moment on the police monitor her phone calls and movements. Which is how they discover that the ransom was paid directly by El Mayo Zambada, because after the shipment was seized in the port of Manzanillo, the Queen is short on cash.

While the Queen embraces her son again after seventeen days in captivity, AFI commander Juan Carlos Ventura Moussong announces that he has proof that the kidnapping was a setup to weaken the Queen’s power. Is it really credible that the son of one of the most important bosses can be kidnapped like that? For Moussong, those responsible must be sought among the Queen’s own men, who are eager to construct an independent microcartel and, above all, to free themselves of that woman. The AFI director’s suspicions are valid, but a short time later he is killed, shot point-blank on the street while coming back from a meeting with the other federal district commanders.