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La Plaza

The ‘queen’ speaks

By Hector Tobar

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The Mexico City newspaper El Universal today begins a three-part interview with the so-called Queen of the Pacific, alleged drug doyenne Sandra Avila Beltran. In the first part, Avila Beltran says the attorney general’s office is responsible for crafting and spreading the ‘queen’ legend. ‘They created me so they could look good in the eyes of the Americans.’ She adds: ‘If I was really a queen, they would have never caught me.’ Once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, Avila Beltran was allegedly a key link between Colombian drug traffickers and the mobsters of the so-called Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

-- Hector Tobar in Mexico City

La Plaza
Hector Tobar

Hector Tobar worked at the Los Angeles Times for two decades: as a city reporter, national and foreign correspondent, columnist and with the books and culture department. He left in September 2014. Tobar was The Times’ bureau chief in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and was part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. He has also worked as features editor at the LA Weekly and as editor of the bilingual San Francisco magazine El Tecolote. Tobar has an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine and studied at UC Santa Cruz and at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. The Los Angeles-born writer is the author of five books, which have been translated into 15 languages. His novel “The Barbarian Nurseries” was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and also won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction; his latest work is “The Last Great Road Bum.” He’s married, the father of three children and the son of Guatemalan immigrants.

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