PicoBlog

Follow the Transoceanic highway from the coast of Honduras, through the border into Guatemala, like dozens of tons of smuggled cocaine does every year, and you could easily miss the tiny town of La Reforma, just off that highway, where the Lorenzana drug-trafficking family was perfectly positioned before they were taken down in the early 2010s.

Unless you were specifically looking for it. Like I was. Last year. During a trip reporting on women I am covering for the book. All of them went to do business there, both good deals and bad. 

But a few months after my visit, they arrested a woman for drug-trafficking in that area: a woman I had barely heard of. Guatemalan authorities took Marta Julia Lorenzana-Cordon, 45, into custody at the behest of the U.S government in May 2021. Lorenzana-Cordon, or Yuli as she is best known (a Spanish-language pronunciation of Julia) is the little sister of Eliu and Waldemar, and the daughter of Waldemar Lorenzana Lima (Waldemar Senior), who was known as “The Patriarch” and was the original trafficker in whose footsteps his children followed. 

During their reign, the Lorenzana’s were one of the most “brutal and destructive” drug trafficking organizations in the world, and worked with Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán's Sinaloa Cartel, amongst others.

Photos of Lorenzana-Cordon following her arrest that day showed her sitting in a police truck, grinning, wearing a pair of white shorts and a blue shirt, and clutching a bottle of water between her long, white fingernails. She was the penultimate of Waldemar senior’s kids to be arrested. She looked neither sad nor worried about her detention at that moment in time. There were some shots of her standing outside the police truck with her hand on her hip, chatting.

But the language used in the indictment against her, which was unsealed at the end of last year, as well as a memorandum justifying pretrial detention, was exceptional. I can’t say I’ve read every single charge-sheet against a woman for drug-trafficking in the region, but I’ve seen many. Lorenzana-Cordon allegedly “played an integral, leadership role in the [drug-trafficking] conspiracy,” according to the charge sheet, which also claims that the U.S government “has evidence personally implicating the Defendant in acts of violence, including murder.” 

She was a violent leader in what was once one of the most sophisticated and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world. I was stunned, and horrified that, after a couple of years investigating women in the drug trade in Guatemala, I could have missed a key female trafficking cog in the machine. Reassuringly, so was my colleague Julie López, who had covered the Lorenzana drug-trafficking clan far longer than I had. Had I, had we, missed Yuli’s criminal evolution completely? Was she a secret powerhouse? 

She was. 

But we hadn’t missed her. Until her indictment and other documents around her case were unsealed, she was invisible. My mini-existential crisis outlines one of the key blinders to the visibility of those working in the drug trade. If there are no indictments, court transcripts, press coverage or other forms of documentation around the activities of individuals, then they remain unseen, or at least, hard to see. The drug-trafficking world isn’t like discovering new musicians or artists - you can’t go around asking what someone’s up to and get a sense of it by hanging around. It’s too much of a health risk. 

Which women I chose to focus on for Patronas was largely determined by the court documents around cases, combined with my access to the women or people who know them. Who law enforcement and the media, go after, and how and when, has a fundamental impact on who we see and hear about in this business. Neither of those are objective agencies, and is why gender bias dynamics are very influential in determining the perception and visibility of women’s participation in trafficking. 

When I was last in Guatemala, Yuli’s indictment was still under seal and she had yet to be arrested. Once she was, I started asking around about her with my sources. She was violent, she did traffic drugs, she threatened other traffickers, I was told. 

The reason that Lorenzana-Cordon stayed out of view for so long was that her trafficking networks were different to those of her brothers and father. So gathering evidence that could indict her took longer, and didn’t dovetail with the investigations around her male family members that were happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Which explained why she was absent from the transcripts and documents of the cases and trials that eventually convicted her male relatives before she was even indicted. 

The Lorenzana-Cordon family, I was told, was deeply dysfunctional and divided. Unsurprising, I suppose, for an illegal dynasty in which the children grew up learning how to traffic narcotics. Yuli is significantly younger than her brothers and decided to go a different way to build out her drug business. Her narco networks were more connected to those of her husband, a notorious and feared trafficker called Jairo Estuardo Orellana Morales. Also known as “el Pelon”, or “baldy,” he started off in the drug trade as a bodyguard working for her family, and possibly others. That could have been when they met. But Orellana Morales eventually broke away from her family’s business and became the Guatemalan operator for the violent Mexican Zetas Cartel, allegedly. 

Orellana Morales has an even more violent reputation than his wife. He is believed to behind one of the worst massacres in the recent history of organized crime in Guatemala: the killing of 27 farmworkers in a ranch in the country’s northern Peten province in 2011, after which the killers left messages daubed on the wall in the victims’ blood.

He was arrested in Zacapa in May 2014, again at the behest of the U.S’s DEA, following a firefight between his armed men and Guatemalan authorities. He and Yuli, according to media reports, got married when he was in custody, although they had long been a couple and had a child together. As the U.S investigation into Orellana Morales deepened, Yuli came more clearly into view, because many of her contacts and deals in the drug trade ran through him. 

So the evidence that had been missing to indict Yuli started to pile up. Orellana Morales was extradited to the U.S just over a year after his arrest. His case has gone quiet since then, and his indictment remains under seal. It’s fair to speculate that in the six plus years that he has been in the U.S justice system, he may have helped the government to add to its collection of evidence on Yuli.

Which is all to say, Orellana Morales led the Americans to his wife, rather than the other way around. And her love for him was her undoing. As historian Elaine Carey put it much better than I ever could, women who are married or related to the mob aren’t just “sitting there stirring the sauce.”

The reasons for her invisibility up until the end of 2021 make sense now. It would be easy to assume that as the younger sibling, Yuli might have followed in her father and brothers footsteps, building her networks on theirs. But that’s not how things worked out. It’s also possible that the focus on her was delayed because there was more urgency and emphasis on gathering evidence against her father and siblings because they’re male, and prioritized as more powerful threats. 

They got to Yuli eventually, through Orellana Morales, but it took a while. It was five years after her husband was arrested that Yuli was indicted, in 2019, and she wasn’t captured until another two years after that.

As always, many questions remain. Did Yuli ever deal with Yaneth Vergara Hernández, Sebastiana Cottón Vásquez, Digna Valle or Marllory Chacón Rossell - women that I featured in Patronas? Did those women also give evidence on Yuli to U.S prosecutors as part of their cooperation in custody? All of this we may learn if Yuli decides to plead not guilty and go to trial. Which seems unlikely, given her family history, so maybe we will never know.

Another thing we might never know? How many other Yulis there are out there, and where they are hiding.

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