Ana María Cameno, on the bench of the National Court, on March 29.
The cameras await Ana María Cameno when she heads towards the National Court.
Shielded behind a mask and sunglasses that cover much of her face, the so-called
Queen of Coca
not only faces the court that is prosecuting her for a million-dollar drug sale, but also the very legend that has built her around.
To the story of a Burgos woman from a wealthy family who built a supposed drug empire from scratch.
She who launched the largest cocaine laboratory in Europe, with figureheads, shell companies, with tentacles in the US and South America, and relationships with dangerous criminal gangs such as Los Miami.
Cameno is a worried woman, according to the Police, for the details and this 2022 is at stake, so, before the journalists,
The Queen
is silent.
“I am not going to testify”, she also tells the magistrates of the Court in the first session of the trial —held last Wednesday— that now corners her for an alleged operation to sell 100 kilos of cocaine in 2014, for which the Prosecutor's Office He asks for 25 years in prison.
Cameno thus chooses to remain silent and waits to see if she emerges victorious from a complex oral hearing that will continue in the coming weeks.
She has already saved, of course, the first match point: none of the 11 alleged partners and subordinates who sit next to her on the bench gave her away.
In this way, the supposed narco wrote a new chapter of a stormy life full of dates marked in red:
September 26, 2014.
Cameno arrives in a Volkswagen Touareg at a car park in La Alcaidesa, an urbanization in La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz), where he meets Graziano Molón, and where two more individuals appear, to whom the Burgos woman Give two plastic bags.
For the agents who surround her for the sale of 100 kilos of coca and who have been following her in her footsteps for months, it is clear: it is another drug exchange.
They don't need more.
They have The Queen.
Again.
March 29, 2022.
At 51 years old, the Queen heard how the magistrate José Antonio Mora pronounced her name.
He was the third person called to testify in the trial of the National High Court that he has just started, one of those that are pending.
Before trying it with her, two of her alleged collaborators in the sale of those 100 kilos of coca had already been interrogated, who threw balls out with arguments of all kinds, and who kept her out of danger at all times.
Later, they were emulated by another nine.
In this legal case, the public ministry maintains that, after leaving prison after being arrested in 2011 for setting up the largest cocaine laboratory in Europe, La Reina returned to her old ways.
She remade herself together with her then new partner, José Ramón Parra, a gym fan – who is in search and capture of her for not showing up last week.
Together, they raised a new criminal organization, with her at the top.
They maintained "regular contacts" with suppliers and with those in charge of transporting the merchandise, according to the accusation, which is based on a summary full of telephone interventions and police surveillance of the suspects.
More information
The Queen of Coca (1/18/2016)
But, despite all the indications, the defendants insist that they do not know what they are talking about.
"I saw Cameno only on a couple of occasions," Graziano Molón's wife, Carmen Cano, defends herself, whom the prosecutor places in drug transfers in which she participates hand in hand with La Reina: "I saw her before her arrest, that she left us a dog for us to take care of [...] and one day I also went with her to Carrefour”.
She doesn't know much either, according to Rubén Isaac Blanco, whom investigators implicate in another cocaine movement: "I've known her for many years... Her mother is a friend of my mother [...] But I hadn't seen her for months [ when she was arrested in 2014].
I don't think I've ever had phone conversations with her."
Reviewing their versions in court is a veritable parade of presumed ignorance.
Miguel Ángel López Palencia, who was intercepted in a Mercedes Benz with 19 kilos of drugs and who supposedly received orders from the drug traffickers, excuses himself that he "does not know anything" about Cameno.
Guillermo Velasco also had no idea about the dirty business, according to what this guard of the Medina del Campo (Valladolid) estate repeats, where he found a drug hidden underground.
Velasco assures that the "packing and weighing" machines seized from him, in addition to bags and other instruments, were simply for "coriander" that he grew and sold to a parlor.
On the right, the lawyer David García Asenjo, who represents himself in the trial, on March 29.
They are also joined, for example, by the lawyer David García Asenjo, to whom the Prosecutor's Office attributes the design of the financial and corporate framework used to launder the money from the sale of the drug.
The lawyer affirms that he never knew the true identity of Cameno, that he knew her as Marta Sánchez, a false name that she used, and that he only asked for help for a "bankruptcy issue" and for an investment abroad.
For the researchers, they are mere excuses to save themselves and The Queen, who had the word
Omertá
[Law of Silence] tattooed on her forearm.
“I am worth more for what I shut up, than for anything else.
I will always cover my friends and all the people I have considered a life partner, ”she said years ago in an interview.
January 7, 2011.
The legend of Cameno begins to grow a decade ago.
On January 18, 2011, the Police announced that they had dismantled the largest laboratory in Europe on a farm in Villanueva de Perales (Madrid), where they located 28,905 liters of solvent, hydraulic presses, precision electronic scales, wooden “agitator” sticks. (used by the “cooks” to stir up the drug mixture)... And, as the head of the facility, she points out to the Burgos woman that she had brought four Biochemistry professors from a Colombian university to set up the shed and that “ develop the manufacturing and handling process” of the cocaine, according to the investigating judge.
Cameno, who was arrested on January 7 of that year, had also forged relationships with three other organizations: the Los Miami clan, led by the brothers Álvaro and Artemio López Tardón —the first of whom was arrested in the US in 2011 , where he was sentenced to 150 years in prison—;
the band of the brothers Raúl and Víctor Juárez Smith;
and the network of the Hispanic-Colombian Laurentino Sánchez,
Lauro
.
Álvaro López Tardón, in a file image.
He had climbed to the top of the Spanish narco and had about twenty subordinates —such as Jorge Simarro, alias
Gordo Panceta
or
Patata—
, according to the investigation of the Court, which has yet to judge all this disjointed network in 2011. Among the evidence collected against Cameno, some red and blue agendas were found that he allegedly used for accounting.
“You must, given, you have left”, “it remains to be delivered”, “in advance”, he wrote down.
Cameno also lent itself to mythification.
She has once defined herself as a "posh", who has undergone aesthetic operations, who goes crazy for jewelry and for dressing well, and that, according to the researchers, she consulted with santeros before taking decisions.
Her nickname of La Reina de la Coca did not take long to become popular, leaving behind other less bombastic aliases attributed to her by the Police at that time:
Pollito
,
Quesito
or
Llorona
.
Since last Wednesday, it is up to the Court to decide if justice has also hunted her down.
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