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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2007 
Mexico Captures "Pacific Queen" Drug Smuggler
 BYLINE
| | In this photo released by the Mexican Attorney General's Office, or PGR, Sandra Avila Beltran, dubbed the Queen of the Pacific, smiles after she was arrested by federal agents outside a restaurant in southern Mexico City, Friday, Sept. 28, 2007. | 
| | A Mexican federal police officer, right, stands next to Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez, aka 'El Tigre,' center, and David Garza Perez, left, as they are shown to the media at a news conference in Mexico City, Friday Sept. 28, 2007. |
Mexico City - Mexican police have captured Sandra Avila, known as the "Queen of the Pacific," one of Mexico's highest profile woman drug smugglers, the government said on Friday.
Avila, 45, helped build up the Sinaloa cartel on Mexico's Pacific Coast in the 1990s via her friendships with the gang's leaders including Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's most wanted man.
She was caught alone driving a BMW sport utility vehicle near her house in the Mexican capital, intelligence officials told a news conference.
Police also captured Avila's boyfriend Colombian trafficker Juan Diego "The Tiger" Espinosa, who is considered to be a key link between Colombian and Mexican smugglers and is wanted in the United States. Police did not give details of his capture.
"Federal police identified a house in the south of the city ... that was the Queen of the Pacific's home under the name Daniela Garcia Chavez," said Patricio Patino, deputy intelligence chief at the public security ministry.
Avila faces organized crime and money laundering charges in Mexico and the United States.
She won her nickname for helping to develop smuggling routes up Mexico's Pacific Coast into California, as well as through the Arizona desert.
She was thought to run her operations out of Mexico's central city of Guadalajara, coordinating shipments of Colombian cocaine north into Mexico and the United States.
Separately in Sinaloa, dozens of men with assault rifles stormed a hospital in western Mexico and pulled a prisoner convicted of murder off the operating table to spirit him from custody, authorities said on Friday.
Ruben Beltran was being guarded by police during an operation to repair a wound to his side that he sustained in jail in the city of Culiacan in Sinaloa state.
"The prisoner was in the operating room when an armed group took everyone by surprise and disarmed the guards," said Sinaloa state health official Arturo Borboa. "It seems they were between 30 and 40 people."
The gunmen overwhelmed two prison guards and seven state police officers, one of whom was wounded. All of the gunmen escaped with the prisoner. |
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