Savages

68

When Elena Sanchez Lauter first took over leadership of the Baja Cartel, a lot of the men assumed that, being a woman, she was weak.

Most of those men are now dead.

She didn’t want to kill them, but she had to, and for this she blames herself. Because she allowed the first man who disrespected her to get away with it. And the second, and the third. Rebellions, fighting, and internecine warfare broke out soon after. The other two cartels—Sinaloa and the Gulf—started to intrude on her territory. She blamed all of them for the burgeoning violence.

It was Miguel Arroyo, “El Helado,” who set her straight.

Lado told her candidly, “You have let people think that it’s all right to defy you, that nothing will happen. You are therefore responsible for the bloodshed and the chaos. If you had displayed that first man’s head on a stake, you would be feared and respected.”

She knew that he spoke the truth. She accepted her responsibility. “But what do I do now?” she asked him.

“Send me.”

She did.

The story goes that Lado went straight to a bar in Tijuana owned by a narcotraficante called “El Guapo.” Lado sat down at a table with his old buddy and drank half a beer before saying, “What kind of men are we, we let a woman be in charge?”

“You, maybe,” El Guapo said. He looked around at the eight or so of his bodyguards. “But that puta can suck my cock.”

Lado shot him in the stomach.

Before the shocked bodyguards could react ten men armed with machine guns came through the door.

The bodyguards dropped their guns to the floor.

Lado took a knife from his belt, leaned over the writhing El Guapo, pulled down his blood-soaked trousers, and asked, “This cock, cabrón?”

A swift swipe of the blade, then Lado asked the room, “Anyone else want their cocks sucked?”

No one did.

Lado stuck it in El Guapo’s mouth, paid for his beer, and left.

That’s the story, anyway.

True, partly true, apocryphal, whatever—the point is that people believed it. What is recorded fact is that within the next two weeks seven more bodies were found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths.

And Elena got a new name.

Elena La Reina.

Queen Elena.

It’s a shame, though, she thinks now, that—

Men teach you how they must be treated.