“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
She taught the women of her time and younger how to hold a Bible with one hand and take bills with the left. She kept silent in the face of sudden wealth and let herself be pampered on a birthday with a private Juan Gabriel concert.
In La Tuna, Badiraguato, when one of the 30,000 inhabitants who still live in the municipality that some call “the cradle of drug trafficking” passed away, all the families knew who to ask to lead the prayers: an elderly woman who knew by heart the most important passages of the Bible and who was known in town as Doña Consuelo, although the country and the world knew her as “El Chapo Guzmán’s mother”.
There is no one in town who doesn’t know the way to the “Casa Rosa” of María Consuelo Loera Pérez, who died this Sunday at the age of 94. So as soon as death struck someone in that corner of the Sierra Madre Occidental, everyone went to the home her son gave her in 1989 and knocked on her door, the same one that has been opened for local politicians, criminals, priests, journalists and even enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Then she, taking short, patient steps, would cross the bougainvillea gardens to receive the news, agree to do the prayers and ask for time to prepare herself spiritually, which meant spending several hours in the chapel built behind her bedroom.
No one seemed to care that Joaquin, her most famous son – in addition to Armida, Bernarda, Miguel Angel, Aureliano, Arturo and Emilio – was a ruthless drug trafficker with a record of thousands of deaths whose families were denied even a body to mourn. Or that she was the beneficiary of the fortune her family amassed on drugs and weapons. Doña Consuelo was loved for the help she gave to the people and admired for her religious knowledge.
If her son Joaquin Guzman Loera was a bad example for thousands of young people, Maria Consuelo Loera Perez was a bad example for the mothers of drug traffickers born in the narco-region known as the Golden Triangle. She, without knowing it or wanting it, defined a generation of women who had to live with a contradiction as public as the call to mass: love God and love drug trafficking.
Doña Consuelo taught the women of her time and younger how to hold a Bible in her right hand and take bills in her left. How to keep silent about the origin of sudden wealth and only announce it if it is to be shared with the people. How to resist the temptation of luxury and settle for a comfortable life so as not to attract the attention of the government, national and foreign. How to defend the honor of a criminal son and maintain, until death, that he is a harmless farmer. Even how to behave in front of the cameras and even in front of a head of state, as in 2020, when she shook hands with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his visit to Sinaloa to supervise the construction of the Badiraguato-Guadalupe y Calvo highway.
She never denied that her son was the bloodthirsty founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, but neither did she confirm it. She never publicly condemned the violence unleashed by the son she procreated with Emilio Guzmán Bustillos in 1957, but privately condemned it when El Chapo showed up at her house to eat her famous enchiladas. She never confirmed that her armed escorts were a product of her family’s illegal business, but against his wishes she had not gone out on the street without them since 2016, when her house was ransacked by hitmen from the Beltran Leyva Cartel.
On the other hand, she did like to boast that her most famous son pampered her like a queen. And in private she would tell how splendid El Chapo was with her, especially on her birthdays, like the one she celebrated with a private concert by Juan Gabriel, whom the cartel flew in a private jet from California, United States, just so he could sing Las Mañanitas to the matriarch of Mexico’s most famous criminal family.
Consuelo Loera corresponded with the Pope
Stories like that are told in La Tuna about the town’s most famous neighbor: that she had millions stored in her backyard, that all the red roses in town were sold on her birthday, that she was a mystic because her home remedies relieved even the deepest pains and that she sent letters to Pope John Paul II and that the religious leader answered them in his own handwriting, grateful for her works.
Perhaps the most told anecdote is the supposed scolding that Doña Consuelo gave to her son Joaquín when Mexican authorities initially pointed him out as the author of the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in May 1993. She was so outraged by the assassination that she ordered a brief truce with the Tijuana Cartel to be established in honor of the cardinal and that weapons would never again be directed against a priest. El Chapo, obediently, agreed with her.
Her values shaped, in a way, the cartel and, by extension, Mexico. She didn’t get involved in her children’s dirty business, and she despised drugs for seeming ungodly, but she did give general recommendations: the family is sacred, children are not to be touched, priests and teachers in the villages should be able to do their work without fear and money should be distributed among the poorest people. Advice that the Guzmán Loera family followed or disregarded, depending on the convenience of the moment.
That 1993 was the year he left anonymity. A month later, in June, El Chapo was arrested in Guatemala and his photograph in the courtyard of the maximum security prison formerly known as Almoloya, with his light brown coat and cap, went around the world. The interest in the life of this shy-looking drug trafficker who murmured “I am a farmer” in front of his captors was extrapolated to his family circle and his mother stopped being just the daughter of Ovidio Loera Cobret and Pomposa Perez Uriarte and became a celebrity to whom journalists begged for an exclusive interview.
To those who dared to drive up to seven hours by car and cross checkpoints and spies to get to the “Casa Rosa”, Doña Consuelo used to return them back the way they arrived, but first she would offer them a taco of some of the stews that gave her so much praise, such as the rabbit asado, machaca, tamales and pozole that she gives away during the patriotic month. “If I offer you something, don’t despise me,” she used to say with a smile.
The decline of her health began in 2021, when she caught covid-19. They say in La Tuna that she acquired the virus after attending a religious ceremony in Badiraguato; others say she caught it while praying next to a sick person who would die irremediably of a respiratory disease. The virus did not scare her as much as being away from God and the people who depended on her to listen to the Holy Scriptures.
She tolerated the quarantine well – despite her age – thanks to her complete vaccination schedule, but the virus left her with sequelae, such as the inability to breathe normally when walking and a hoarseness that accompanied her until the end of her days.
At the end of November, the consequences of the coronavirus weakened her body so much that she could no longer continue with medical treatment at home and was transferred to the Culiacan Hospital Clinic, where she died on December 10 of natural causes.
Her body, announced Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, will return to La Tuna, as was her wish. Masses and rosaries will be organized and red roses will be sold out again. Only one wish will remain unfulfilled: as she requested in writing in a letter to the president, she did not want to die without traveling to the United States to embrace one last time her son Joaquin, whose life is running out in the maximum security prison ADX Florence in Colorado.
When the people gather to say goodbye to María Consuelo Loera Pérez, they will have to find someone to lead the rosary. Chapo’s mom” now rests in peace.