Sandra Ávila Beltrán, popularly known as
The Queen of the Pacific
, has gone from a Mexican prison, accused of being a key player in the Sinaloa cartel in sending shipments of cocaine to the United States, to succeed on social networks with videos on TikTok.
"Yes, it's me,"
says Ávila Beltrán with a towel on his head in a video published a few days ago, "the other [accounts] are not mine."
"For all the people asking if I'm the real one and the real thing, yes," she adds as she packs her travel bag;
the video lasts just over a minute and already has more than 200,000 views.
In just a few days, the account has amassed more than 13,000 followers.
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"I wanted to thank you for being with me," he says, "for all those beautiful comments that you put on me.
Sorry that I have not written to you, that I have not answered you as it should be, I have had a little bit of occupations”.
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Since she was released in 2015, little was known about the woman who inspired the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez Reverte in the
Queen of the South.
Ávila Beltrán was arrested in September 2007 in Mexico for drug trafficking, but won several judicial appeals against the Mexican authorities during Felipe Calderón's six-year term.
In 2010 a judge determined that there were not enough elements to link her to the operations of the Sinaloa cartel and in 2012 she was extradited to the United States, where she faced trial for drug trafficking.
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Ávila Beltrán negotiated those charges and pleaded guilty to financially assisting her sentimental partner, Juan Diego Espinoza
El Tigre
, operator of the Norte del Valle de Colombia cartel.
She was sentenced to 70 months in prison, which she served until August 20, 2013, when she returned deported to Mexico and was interned in the Nayarit prison.
She was serving a five-year sentence there for money laundering, but a judge ruled that she was convicted of the same crime in the United States and was released in February 2015.
In 2019, he won the legal battle against the Mexican government and got eight bank accounts released.
Ávila Beltrán became a very popular figure who inspired two books (
La Reina del Pacífico
by Julio Scherer García; and
La Reina del Sur
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte) and several narcocorridos.
He has always denied all the accusations against him, as well as being a family of famous Mexican capos such as Félix Gallardo and Emilio Quintero Payán.
However, he admitted that he met drug trafficking leaders such as Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán;
Ismael
El Mayo
Zambada;
Amado Carrillo Fuentes;
and the Arellano Felix brothers.
“The government relates me to the capos, as if I were one of them.
But I met them when they were ordinary people, ”he told Scherer in his book.
