Dame of Death: Infamous cartel boss and social media star 'La Catrina' dies agonizing death in shootout with police
A Mexican female cartel boss was fatally shot on Friday, January 10, after reports of her links with an attack against the military, national guard and police surfaced in La Bocanda, a town in the central state of Michoacán.
In a video that surfaced earlier this week, María Guadalupe López Esquivel, 21, known as 'La Catrina,' a member of a cartel squad that killed 13 police officers in October last year, was seen taking her last breaths. She was shot in the neck and blood could be seen flowing down her clothes as she struggled to breathe, as seen in the video.
One police officer could be heard trying to calm her down while she awaited a helicopter flight to the hospital. “Calm down, kid. The helicopter is coming for you,” the officer says in the footage as he approaches Catrina, who was sitting with her back against a wall. “It is coming now, easy, easy, you are going to be OK. Try to hang on.”
According to Daily Mail, in separate footage, viewed by the website, a soldier was seen carrying Catrina, who knelt on the ground before she was placed inside an awaiting helicopter in the municipality of Tepalcatepec.
Apart from the cartel boss woman being killed, the Michoacán authorities also captured six male gunmen after they opened fire on soldiers and police in the same area where the October ambush occurred. Some of the suspects who were arrested were identified as Alejandra; Everardo; Brayan Juan; Juan Carlos; Octavio; Pedro; and Alejandro.
Although the identity of the woman killed in the Friday shootout was not officially released by the state authorities, videos and photos posted online on late Sunday showed that the woman who lay wounded on a stretcher had a tattoo of a "Catrina" on her thigh - which matched with the photos of Catrina's ink, taken from her Instagram page that were circulating on social media.
A famous photo of her showing her posing with a 'golden' gun has also been doing rounds on social media.
Catrina, who also operated in her country under the names 'La Catrina', and Mexico's 'Grande Dame of Death', left the city of Tepalcatepec, where she grew up, and went to live with an unnamed member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in the Michoacán municipality of Aguililla in 2017, Mexican newspaper El Universal, reported.
It was very rare for a women to occupy high-level positions as 'money launderers' in drug cartels which would let them command or coordinate hit squads. On the day that the shooting took place, Catrina was reportedly meeting with top cartel cell leader, Miguel 'M2' Fernández before the altercation with the police started. M2 reportedly escaped unharmed.