Women in Mexico's Drug War: Victims and Villains

InSight Crime: "Media representations of women caught up Mexico’s drug conflict are often two-dimensional, resorting to the dichotomy of portraying women either as helpless victims or powerful “drug queens.”

By now it is a familiar narrative: women are uniquely victimized in Mexico's male-dominated drug war, frequently targeted in revenge killings or the subjects of sexual exploitation. Since February 2008, the Mexican government’s special task force on violence against women estimates that there have been more than 1,500 cases of missing females, one third of which were never resolved. ... Alongside this runs another narrative, that of the powerful woman at the head of a drug cartel. " read more