For the past five years, the GANGS project, a European Research Council-funded project led by Dennis Rodgers, has been studying global gang dynamics in a comparative perspective. When understood in a nuanced manner that goes beyond the usual stereotypes and Manichean representations, gangs and gangsters arguably constitute fundamental lenses through which to think about and understand the world we live in.
Dennis Rodgers describes how “Soraya” became involved in drug trafficking in Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Known locally as “la Reina del Sur” – the “Queen of the South” – her story shows how drug trafficking is a highly gendered activity, that reinforces macho violence and patriarchal dynamics of domination.
Seated on a slightly tatty, overstuffed sofa, I watch as Soraya meticulously manicures Wanda’s fingernails. Her face a picture of tense concentration, she begins by carefully tracing red and white stripes along the distal bands of four out of five fingers on each hand, before then delicately dotting small flowers on each index.
We are in the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor urban neighbourhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, in Central America. I’ve been carrying out longitudinal ethnographic research on gang dynamics there since 1996. I returned in February 2020 to, among other things, interview Wanda about the way that the local drug trade – and particularly her husband Bismarck’s involvement – had impacted her life over the years. Wanda is one of my key research interlocutors in the barrio, whom I’ve known for over 25 years.
“I can come back to do our interview later,” I say to Wanda.
“No, no, it’s fine, Dennis,” she replies. “Soraya’s almost finished, and in any case, she’s de confianza, so why don’t we just get started? It’s not as if she doesn’t know about Bismarck and his drug dealing… But you know what? If you want a female perspective on drugs, you should really interview her, not me – I’m just the wife of an ex-drug dealer, but she’s la Reina del Sur!”
“The Queen of the South?”, I ask, throwing Soraya a querying glance. Looking up from her manicuring labours, she smirks sardonically before saying, “You know, Dennis, like in the telenovela, about that Mexican woman who becomes a narcotraficante (drug dealer).”
“Yes, I get that, I know the series, but she became a powerful drug dealer, and from what I know you’re not a big-time narco, are you?”
“Nah, I was just a mulera (street dealer), but people call me la Reina del Sur, because I’m strong-willed and independent, just like the real Reina.”
Chuckling, I reply, “You do know the Reina isn’t real, yes?”, before then asking her more earnestly, “but would you be willing to do an interview with me about all that, though?” Soraya ponders my request for a few seconds before replying brusquely, “dale, but not today, I’ve got an errand to run. I’ll meet you here at the same time tomorrow”.
Without waiting for an answer, Soraya then dots a final petal on Wanda’s left index nail, packs up her files and polish, and leaves Wanda and me to our interview.
The gendered nature of drug dealing in Latin America
Drug trafficking has become an searing topic in Latin America over the last two decades.
Every year, this criminal activity results in thousands of violent deaths and tens of thousands of health-related mortalities. Drug trafficking also has profoundly negative effects on economies, political systems, and ecologies in the region.
Numerous studies have traced the forms of production, the actors involved, the routes and flows, the nature of local and international markets, and the profound but variable social impact that drugs can have.
One point on which most studies agree is that drug trafficking is a predominantly male activity. Fewer women than men are involved, and they are generally seen through the prism of particular categorisations: either as victims, suffering direct and indirect forms of violence as a result of being the mothers, wives or girlfriends of drug traffickers, or as emancipated and liberated individuals whose involvement in trafficking challenges gender-based structures of power and inequality.
These kinds of binary representations have long seemed simplistic to me. The interviews conducted with Wanda during the course of my years of research in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández have highlighted how the image of the drug dealer’s wife as a victim of her husband’s trafficking is a caricature. The same was also true of the interview I conducted with Soraya about her career as a drug dealer, which challenged the notion that drug dealing could be emancipating for a woman.
“Pac-Man” in the barrio
Soraya was born in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in 1987. Her mother, Gladys, was from the neighbourhood, while her father, Jorge, was from Villa Cuba, a neighbourhood in the north-east of Managua. They had an on-and-off relationship for the first decade of Soraya’s life, meaning that she moved several times between her father’s home in Villa Cuba, and her maternal family home in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández. Gladys and Jorge split up definitely when Soraya was 13 years old, after Gladys stabbed Jorge with a kitchen knife while defending Soraya, whom he was beating.
“My mother and I moved back [to barrio Luis Fanor Hernández] after we left my father. There were five of us in the house – me, my mother, my aunt, my cousin, and my cousin’s husband. You know him, Dennis, he’s the one they call ‘Pac-man’ [because of his great appetite], so you know he’s a narcotraficante [drug dealer]. My aunt and my cousin would help him from time to time with his bisnes, but this was when the drug trade was increasing, and he had lots to do, and they started asking me to ‘do them a favour’, to help them. At first it was small things, you know, moving drugs or money from one place to another, or helping them ‘cook’ cocaine into crack, but after a while I started selling for him as a mulera, in the streets, which I could do well because the police were less suspicious of me, as a young girl, you know.”
Neither the way nor the reasons why Soraya became involved in trafficking can be described as particularly emancipatory. Rather, they highlight the way in which drug trafficking in fact responds to very gendered and “intimate” logics. On the one hand, Soraya’s status as a young woman made her useful to her cousin’s husband in carrying out certain drug trafficking operations without attracting suspicion in a wider macho Nicaraguan context, but on the other hand, her family ties to “Pac-Man” also made it difficult for her to refuse to help him.
Enduring gendered oppression
Soraya’s involvement in drug trafficking was also profoundly affected by her relationship with Elvis Gomez, with whom she became involved at the age of 15 (when Elvis was 23). Elvis was a failed drug dealer. He had tried unsuccessfully to become involved in drug trafficking several times in the past, and once he was in a relationship with Soraya, he forced her to let him work with her so that he could benefit from the financial windfall that this activity generated for those involved in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández.
One of the reasons Elvis had failed to establish himself as a drug dealer was that he was a drug user, and Soraya often had to cover for him when he consumed the drugs that “Pac-Man” gave him instead of selling them, repaying his loss of earnings through the profits of her own drug dealing.
In 2010, Elvis used the savings that Soraya had accumulated from her drug dealing to finance his emigration to the United States. He told her he would bring her over later, but he left with another woman, Yulissa, with whom he had been involved simultaneously, along with their daughter. He also took Ramses, the son he had with Soraya in 2007, and cut off all contact with Soraya. She told me poignantly, “I was going crazy, texting him every day, telling him to let me talk to my son, and telling him to bring him back to Nicaragua, that I wanted him to live with me”. He only got back in touch in 2016, to insist that Soraya divorce him and formally transfer legal custody of Ramses to him, which she eventually did, in exchange for being able to be in regular contact with her son.
This episode clearly illustrates how Soraya’s trafficking activities inscribed themselves within wider structures and practices of gender inequality and male domination. Nicaragua remains a country marked by patriarchy and machismo, something that was strikingly reflected in the law banning abortion under all circumstances passed in 2008, or the adoption of law 779 on gender violence in 2012, which defines all such instances as “domestic violence” that must be resolved through mediation rather than the penal system.
In the end, although she was known as la Reina del Sur, this nickname had nothing to do with Soraya having a position of dominance in the drug trade in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández. Indeed, the vast majority of (few) women drug dealers in the neighbourhood were at the bottom of the business pyramid.
Beautician
Soraya says she stopped selling drugs in 2012, and that she is now a full-time beautician. Several current drug dealers in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández have, however, told me that she continues to deal and that her manicure business provides a convenient cover.
The fact that Soraya earns no more than 15 to 20 dollars a week from her manicure business could clearly be interpreted as suggesting that this might be the case. Soraya firmly denies it, however, and I believe her. Not only does she take on various odd jobs to make ends meet for herself and her ageing mother, she also lives in very humble conditions. Her current home, in particular, is much less flamboyant than any of those in which she lived in the past.
When compared to the trajectories of male traffickers in the barrio – many of whom have greatly benefited, and continue to benefit, from their involvement in trafficking even after they have stopped dealing – it can be argued that Soraya’s involvement in drug trafficking has enhanced patriarchal and macho constraints, contributing to her current situation.
At the same time, while Soraya’s life has unquestionably been marked by a constant struggle in the face of different forms of domination and oppression, she also frequently and persistently seeks to confront and challenge her predicament. This is perhaps partly linked to her involvement in the drug trade, as the WhatsApp exchange I had with Soraya on 8 March 2021 clearly suggested. She had uploaded a picture of herself drinking at a nightclub, overlaying it with the following text:
“Today is International Women’s Day, and we celebrate the power of independent and autonomous women! We are beautiful, we are strong, and we can do whatever we want!”.
I wrote to Soraya to wish her a happy International Women’s Day, and also to tell her that I’d started to write her biography “about when she was la Reina del Sur”. A few minutes later she replied – “por siempre La Reina!” (“forever the Queen!”).
Dennis Rodgers a reçu une bourse ERC Advanced Grant (no. 787935) du Conseil Européen de la Recherche (https://erc.europa.eu) pour un projet intitulé “Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography” (GANGS).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
