Two women were part of a killing squad that assassinated a police chief in the state of Jalisco last week, reportedly on behalf of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The women sat in wait on the porch of a cafe in Zapopan, Jalisco, along with two male companions, on the morning of November 13, according to a video seen by VICE News.
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Their victim was Carlos Manuel Flores Amezcua, a local police chief. When Flores crossed the cafe patio to open the glass door, he glanced behind him and the four assailants got to their feet, shooting him with more than twenty bullets as he dropped to the ground.
All four attackers then fled the scene – three of them to the street but one of the women went into the cafe. She fired a final couple of shots into Flores Amezcua before making her getaway.
Zapopan’s municipal president lamented the police chief’s death, calling it a “cowardly attack.”
The killing was believed to have been carried out by the women, and men, on behalf of the CJNG organization according to the news outlet Zeta. CJNG is run by one of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted drug-traffickers, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera-Cervantes, who has a ten million dollar bounty on his head.
Flores is reportedly the 23rd police officer to be killed in the state of Jalisco this year.
WARNING: Video contains graphic violence
It was the participation of the women in the brutal murder that most shocked officials and Mexicans, according to the newspaper’s report on the incident. But this is not the first time that women have killed for Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, and although largely invisible they have long peppered the ranks of the country’s criminal armies.
Melissa Margarita Calderon Ojeda, also known as “la China,” is one of the best known cartel assassins, and famously protected Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s right-hand man Damaso Lopez as the head of his hit squad. Profiled in the Daily Beast some years ago, La China allegedly “fielded a host of drug dealers on red Italian motorbikes, along with some 300 sicarios to back up her claim not just on La Paz, but on the resort town of Cabo San Lucas.”
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She is currently incarcerated in a prison in Baja California, Mexico.
Neither are women above, or below, ordering hits out on people to further their power and control within the cartels. In the mob, killings are usually delegated to hired killers by the higher-ups.
An investigation by VICE News shows that there have been a number of high-ranking women at the helm of drug-trafficking organizations across Latin America in recent years. Digna Valle, a matriarch for the Valle Cartel in Honduras, would allegedly send trucks of armed men to get rid of those who weren’t loyal to her and her family in the tiny town of El Espiritu, from which they smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States, according to asylum seekers in the U.S.
Further north in Guatemala, Sebastiana Cottón Vásquez, ruled her territory on the border with Mexico – from where she helped transport tons of cocaine across the border for the Sinaloa Cartel – with an iron fist.
During her sentencing for drug charges in 2015, U.S. prosecutor Monique Botero said: “This is somebody who was known through Guatemala, known through Mexico, as a woman who should be feared because she had the ability to make a lot of things happen.”
