María Dolores Estévez Zuleta ("Lola la Chata")

The “White Lady of Mexico City” — a heroin dealer whose career spanned roughly three decades and whose operation supplied much of the capital’s morphine and heroin market from the 1930s through the 1950s. Lola la Chata is a foundational figure in Elaine Carey’s Women Drug Traffickers, which uses her case to dismantle the assumption that women in the mid-century drug trade were confined to the role of mule or victim.

US Treasury and FBN agents spent decades compiling files on her; William S. Burroughs name-checked her in his letters from Mexico City. Her career spans and illuminates the period in which the Mexican drug trade was transitioning from loosely organized urban distribution into the more centralized structures that would become the mid-century narcopopulist order.