Category: Interviews

Sandra Beltran: Mexico’s Most Infamous Female Organized Crime Boss Gives Her First Post Prison Interview 

October 2015, Sandra Ávila Beltran, the revered “Queen of Cocaine” or “Queen of the Pacific” was released from prison.

She has spent the last seven years in confinement for money laundering, including two years in solitary confinement.

Avila, now in her early 50s, was arrested in 2007 in Mexico City with her Colombian boyfriend, Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez, whom officials claimed was also a powerful drug-world figure.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Avila is believed to have been a rare figure — a powerful woman — in Latin America’s testosterone-saturated drug world, and her story has become a kind of genre to itself, particularly with the success of ‘La Reina del Sur,’ the wildly popular Telemundo telenovela to which Avila’s life is sometimes compared. (Fortune)

 

Sandra Ávila Beltrán at home. Photograph: Jonathan Franklin

The former Cartel queen pin gave an exclusive interview, her first in nearly a decade, from her home near Guadalajara, Mexico. In that interview she lashed out at political corruption in Mexica, mocked the futility of drug prohibition and praised Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Ávila is the stuff legends are made of – one of the few women with access to the highest levels of cartel life. She has lived, worked and loved inside the upper echelons of the Mexican drug world since the late 1970s. At the height of her career, she showed a propensity to carry suitcases with millions of dollars in crisp $100 bills.

Check out the entire insightful interview with one of the notorious women of the underworld: Queen of Cartels: most famous female leader of Mexico’s underworld speaks out 

10 Accounts Of Life In The Witness Protection Program

pixabay1. YOU BASICALLY FEEL LIKE A CAGED ANIMAL

“Being in this program is hard because you’re isolated. You can’t see your family. You have to cut loose your friends. You basically feel like a caged animal. I feel my life is still in danger. I will always have to look over my shoulder.

Read the entire article | 10 Accounts Of Life In The Witness Protection Program

Mexican Actress Kate del Castillo Explains Flirtatious ‘El Chapo’ Texts With Diane Sawyer 

Mexican actress Kate del Castillo and Hollywood actor Sean Penn have been embroiled in controversy since the revelation that they met with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the most wanted drug lord in the world, in person while he was on the lam last year.

Mexican authorities want to interrogate her as a witness in an investigation and have insinuated they could be potentially investigating her for allegedly taking money from Guzman for her tequila company, Honor del Castillo, according to the newspaper El Universal.

This past January, del Castillo’s private text messages with El Chapo were leaked to the media, suggesting another kind of scandal — that the two of them could be romantically involved.


But del Castillo is now sharing her side of the story and insists in an interview with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer that there was nothing romantic between her and the drug kingpin, whom she met in person last October.

del Castillo told Sawyer:

“Oh, my God, no, not at all. It’s just so not like that, and that’s one of the frustrations I have. That I wish I could have every single text that I sent with me, you know, to tell everybody how out of context they are. There was no reason why we wouldn’t be friendly.”

Del Castillo says the leaked messages were selectively chosen and released out of context.

“They have put them out of context. So it looks like I’m having an affair, almost, with a guy and that’s what makes me so angry.”

 

Del Castillo, 43, became a superstar after she appeared as the lead character, Teresa Mendoza, an ordinary woman who transforms into a fearless drug lord in the telenovela “La Reina del Sur” or “The Queen of the South.”

She said Guzman first reached out to her in summer 2014 through his lawyer, who she said told her that Guzman wanted to give her the rights to make a movie about his life. The drug lord had been re-arrested in February 2014.

She claims she jumped at the chance and told almost no one about the project, except for two movie producers she brought on as she began to assemble her team.

Read more of this article see a video of the 2020 interview on ABCNews.