Drug war in Mexico attracts new blood

Urban legend or real? It almost doesn’t matter; it’s the sort of widely repeated account that both intimidates and titillates. And it highlights a disturbing trend: As drug violence seeps deeper into Mexican society, women are taking a more hands-on role.

In growing numbers, they are being recruited into the ranks of drug smugglers, dealers, and foot soldiers. And in growing numbers, they are being jailed, and killed, for their efforts.

Here in Sinaloa, the nation’s oldest drug-producing region and home to its most powerful cartel, the wives of drug lords were long viewed as trophies with rhinestone-studded fingernails and surgical enhancements.

Now wives - and mothers and daughters - are being used by male traffickers because women can more easily pass through the military checkpoints that have popped up along many drug-transport routes.

As Mexico has become a nation that also consumes drugs, women have become addicts, which sucks them into the narcotics underworld.

Mexico’s worst economic crisis since World War II is also helping to fuel the trend; for desperate women, dealing and smuggling are often seen as a more dignified job than prostitution, said Pedro Cardenas, a Sinaloa State public security official in charge of prisons.

Drug violence that preys on women, in a patriarchal, macho society such as that of Sinaloa, has become an urgent problem in the past year, which has seen more killings than ever, said Margarita Urias, head of the Sinaloa Institute for Women.

The trend ultimately could pose a threat to the stability of family structures in Mexico, a country where the woman is usually the glue holding a family together.

“It is a social cancer contaminating women who weren’t touched before,’’ Urias said. “When we are so vulnerable, how do we educate and bring up our children? When insecurity overwhelms us, how do we inject values into our homes? How can we remain immune?’’

Veronica Vasquez curses her drug-smuggling husband.

He was not home the night the army came calling. She did not have time to dispose of the bags of cocaine he had hidden in the bedroom. Now she’s serving five years in the prison in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, and he is still free.

“I am paying for his crime,’’ said Vasquez, 32. “But I knew what he was doing.’’

Vasquez, who has two children, lost not just her freedom but all the trappings of the good life she enjoyed. The jewelry and designer handbags and fancy sunglasses, all within easy grasp without having to work very hard.

“It is all gone,’’ she said. As for her husband: “He is dead to me.’’

Carmen Elizalde was caught transporting 220 pounds of cocaine from Panama to Mexico. Nabbed on the Honduran border with Guatemala and sentenced to 18 years in prison, she says the deal was her husband’s doing. She had been duped, she said, into going along on what he portrayed as a vacation in Panama. But she didn’t ask many questions either.

“Truth is, I didn’t want to examine his activities,’’ said Elizalde, 49, a mother of two. “He was giving us a good life, and I didn’t care where the money came from.’’

Mirna Cartagena blames no one but herself. She wanted the quick, easy money. For $1,000, all she had to do was put about 7 pounds of cocaine in her suitcase and board a bus from Culiacan to Mexicali, a city on the California border.

Police pulled her from the bus about halfway along the route, and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“It was a matter of necessity and ignorance, of not thinking of alternatives,’’ Cartagena, 31, said with a toss of her long, curly hair, peering from behind sunglasses.