IN MEXICO, A FUGITIVE'S ARREST CAPTIVATES THE CAMERAS

MEXICO CITY -- A woman who succeeds in a field dominated by men is
always intriguing to the public, but when that field happens to be
big-time cocaine trafficking, and the woman is graced with both charm
and beauty, a criminal celebrity is born.

Ever since her arrest last month, Sandra Avila Beltran, better known
as the Queen of the Pacific, has been getting the kind of press here
that would have made Jesse James envious. Mexicans are closely
following the case against her and the efforts to extradite her to
United States, where she is wanted in Florida.

Prosecutors here say Ms. Avila Beltran, a shapely, raven-haired,
46-year-old with a taste for high fashion, has played an important
role in forging a federation of drug traffickers in western Sinaloa
State as well as creating an alliance between them and Colombian suppliers.

Along the way, she seduced many drug kingpins and upper-echelon police
officers, becoming a powerful force in the cocaine world through a
combination of ruthless business sense, a mobster's wiles and her sex
appeal, prosecutors say.

It is a measure of her importance in the Mexican underworld that some
Tijuana musicians have written a song in her honor. This
"narco-corrido" extols her virtues as "a top lady who is a key part of
the business." It has been played over and over on radio stations
since her arrest.

The police say Ms. Avila Beltran was born into the trade. She is the
niece of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, an important trafficker from
Guadalajara serving a long sentence for smuggling and the murder of an
American drug-enforcement agent, Enrique Camarena. Another uncle is
Juan Jose Quintero Payan, who was extradited to the United States
recently on drug smuggling charges. Her list of romantic conquests,
the police say, include important members of the Sinaloa cartel like
Ismael Zambada, known as El Mayo, and Ignacio Coronel, known as Nacho,
investigators say. Both remain powerful leaders in the Sinaloa
organization.

Her lovers have fared better than her legal husbands. She was at one
time married to Jose Luis Fuentes, the commander of the federal police
in Sinaloa, who was executed gangland style. Later she married Rodolfo
Lopez Amavizca, the commander of the National Institute for the Combat
Against Drugs, which is now defunct. He was also murdered in 2000 by a
gunman in a hotel in Hermosillo, the capital of northwestern Sonora
State.

Of all her love affairs, however, it was her longtime union with a
reputed Colombian trafficker, Juan Diego Espinosa, who calls himself
the Tiger, that cemented her position in the upper echelons of the
Mexican underworld.

Together, the two of them forged deals between Mexican and Colombian
traffickers in the late 1990s and in 2000. She took control of
shipping cocaine from the North Valley Cartel in Colombia to ports in
western Mexico, thus earning her name the Queen of the Pacific.

At the same time, Ms. Avila Beltran established several legitimate
businesses that investigators suspect were used to launder money -- a
string of tanning salons and a thriving real estate company with more
than 200 properties in Sonora State.

But her luck began to run out in December 2001, when the authorities
seized a tuna boat, the Macel, in the port of Manzanillo and found
more than nine tons of cocaine aboard, worth $80 million.

Six months later, her teenage son was kidnapped in Guadalajara, and
she slipped up. She contacted the authorities for help. She eventually
asked the police to stay out of the way, handled the negotiations with
the kidnappers herself and got her son back after 17 days.

But prosecutors say the $5 million ransom request raised their
suspicions about her income. They started investigating her, and by
July 2002 had found evidence linking her to the Macel shipment. They
also linked her to other members of Mr. Espinosa's family, among them
a woman who was arrested at the Mexico City airport carrying about
$1.5 million, prosecutors say.

Ms. Avila Beltran eluded arrest and went underground. She lived
quietly in Mexico City with Mr. Espinosa in a middle-class
neighborhood and went by the name Daniela Garcia Chavez.

She did not drop her taste for luxury. She was fond of dining at Chez
Wok, an expensive Thai restaurant in the Polanco neighborhood. She
drove a BMW and frequented hair salons favored by television
celebrities.

In March 2004, she was indicted on separate drug smuggling charges in
Miami along with several members of the Espinosa family, according to
court documents. But United States agents made no headway toward her
arrest, even though she was living a high-profile lifestyle in Mexico
City, court documents said.

Eventually, last year, a United States judge ordered arrest warrants
for two other defendants be quashed in an effort to get them to
cooperate and help to locate Ms. Avila Beltran. The judge pointed out
that she had been a fugitive in Mexico for years.

On Sept. 28, more than 30 Mexican federal agents swarmed into a diner
where she was having coffee and arrested her. She coolly asked the
agents to let her freshen her makeup before the police filmed her
transfer to jail. On the videotape, she tosses her hair and smiles for
the camera, strutting in tight jeans and spiked heels, on the arm of
an agent.

In a later tape of her being questioned by the police, she describes
herself as a housewife who earns a little money on the side "selling
clothes, houses." Asked why she had been arrested, she responds with
nonchalance: "Because of an extradition order to the United States."

Though some local press reports said the federal case against her was
weak, a judge last week ordered her arrested. She responded with her
trademark insouciance at a hearing where charges related to the Macel
shipment were recited for the record. "I already know them by heart,"
she noted.

Her life behind bars at the Santa Martha Acatitla women's prison in
the capital has apparently not been to her liking. She filed a
complaint with a Mexico City human rights commission, saying her cell
had insects, which she referred to as "noxious fauna." She also said
the ban on bringing in food from restaurants violated her rights.