Meet Melissa... bloodiest drug lord on Earth
AS one of the world’s most powerful drug lords, she had a private army of 300 henchmen — and is said to have killed 180 people herself.
But now bloodthirsty murderer La China, real name Melissa Margarita Calderon Ojeda, is finally behind bars.
Known for her trademark red lipstick and love of tight-fitting outfits, the gun-toting gangster queen exuded a feminine glamour that set her apart from her male rivals in the brutal world of Mexico’s drug cartels.
Such was her notoriety, a hit song was written based on La China which described an attractive woman arriving at cartel meetings in an SUV.
Now the 31-year-old sits in a high-security prison facing life without parole after being shopped to cops last month by her terrified boyfriend, Pedro “El Chino” Gomez, who feared he would be killed when she eventually grew tired of him.
La China narrowly evaded capture when Mexican special forces burst into her home in La Paz. She fled minutes before they arrived, leaving laundry still dripping on the line and a deadly arsenal of assault guns and ammunition lying around.
But months later she was arrested boarding a plane at Los Cabos, a Mexican resort favoured by Hollywood A-listers such as Jennifer Aniston.
Her capture last month ended a decade-long reign of terror — and it was La China’s taste for carrying out executions herself instead of leaving the murderous work to her foot soldiers that led to her downfall.
La China began her crime career in 2005 while dating a member of the Damaso drug cartel.
El Chapo, real name Joaquin Guzman, 57, has amassed a fortune exceeding a billion dollars and is considered the world’s most powerful drug trafficker after seizing control of the US heroin market from a rival Colombian cartel.
The Sinaloa won following a drug war which saw nearly 12,000 people killed.
Marked out by her ruthlessness and love of violence, La China rose through the ranks of the Sinaloa cartel before being made leader of the Las Fuerzas Especiales de los Damaso (the Special Forces) — the brutal enforcement unit of the Damaso cartel.
Javier Valdez, a Mexican journalist who interviewed female traffickers for his book Miss Narco, says it is
“very rare” for any woman to rise through the ranks and wield power in a cartel.
He said: “This is a world where men behave like animals. Many women in it are used, abused, then killed by the same traffickers they worked with.”
But La China was just as brutal as her male counterparts.
Her trademark was to dump the organs of her victims on the doorstep of their families.
One of her favourite ploys was to get a pretty friend of hers in a short skirt to pretend to be drunk so the target would come to her aid.
Then La China would come out and shoot him dead.
One witness, who saw her boyfriend die in such a way, heard his killer yell out: “A gift from La China!”
Two men, one wearing only his underpants, are seen being dragged out and thrown into a truck before it is driven away at high speed.
Later, the murder and dismemberment of one of the men was found on a video clip on a mobile phone of La China’s own boyfriend.
But her leadership of the Special Forces unit ended when its former head — a man called El Grande — was released from prison and wanted his old job back. Furious La China was stripped of her role.
She was especially livid because El Grande had killed her first love, Erick Davalos Von Borstel. He had been her mentor and trained her to become a killer for hire, known as “sicaria” — an echo of Emily Blunt drug thriller Sicario, which is set in the same violent world of Mexican drug cartels where La China dwelt.
In a fit of rage, she left the Damaso Cartel and set up her own gang, declaring war on her former bosses. The role of her new gang was, she told her members, to “kill and sell drugs”.
La China employed several hundred drug runners who ran around town on red Italian motorbikes she had specially imported.
Her new boyfriend, Hector Pedro Camarena Gomez — known as El Chino — was her second-in-command.
La China’s gang, which employed a full-time gravedigger to deal with the trail of dead bodies they were leaving, quickly built up power and status.
Her rise was helped by corrupt cops she had on her payroll, and her habit of doling out big bags of cocaine to her troops if they had done well.
He was ordered to find a new pickup truck because La China was worried authorities had her vehicle under surveillance.
He arranged to buy one from a friend’s parents, but when they arrived with the van La China had them murdered. El Tyson protested, so furiously that La China chopped off his arms before killing him.
She then targeted one of the Damaso drug cartel who had refused to join La China’s gang.
When he evaded capture, she kidnapped his girlfriend Lulu and brutally tortured her to death. It was this murder which sickened boyfriend El Chino so much he turned grass, fearing for his own life.
When she was captured by cops, he told police La China had turned into a “bloodthirsty monster”.
He blabbed about her murderous crime spree and led police to her favourite burial ground, a dry river bed where they found five bodies — including those of El Tyson and Lulu.
La China planned to fly to Culiacan in Sinaloa to hide in the mountains — but she was arrested when she arrived at the airport in Los Cabos.
She was identified by her fingerprints and her many tattoos, including the one of her ex Erick.
Years before, her ambition had been to follow in the footsteps of female gang lord Enedina Arellano Felix, 54
— known as “La Jeffa”, or “the boss” — who heads the notorious Tijuana cartel.
The woman who once posted a Facebook photo of herself proudly toting two AK-47s above her head is now caged in Almoloyita, a maximum security jail.
She is watched around the clock by prison authorities who are determined not to let her tunnel her way to freedom like her former boss El Chapo.
Mike Vigil, former Drugs Enforcement Agency Chief of International Operations, said: “La China is highly revered and she is a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.
“The Mexico drugs gangs are not an equal opportunity employer. This is a male-dominated field of work.
“There have been very few women to break that glass ceiling. The few who do have to be just as vicious and skilled as the men.
“But her reign of terror is now finally over.”
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