“Chess trains the mind, in the end, what else am I if not a good strategist? Being ambitious, not wanting to depend on testosterone and knowing how to function in this world dominated by men, being one of the pioneers in dedicating myself to Asturian Ana Garrido, speaking to La Vanguardia, is the one who speaks in this way about how she gained a place in the leadership of the cocaine cartels, dominated by men.

Garrido is the woman who has received the highest sentence for drug trafficking in Spain. She was in 2002. She was sentenced to 32 years in prison. This daughter of miners was a rare bird within the drug trade from which she today says she is far from: “Totally. First of all, because of my age and how harsh my media condemnation was. I can’t go back to yesterday. I am a different person. The essence of life is to go forward. I would like to be as separate from anything that can be called society.”

That character capable of leaving a small town in Asturias and reaching scenes like Madrid and Marbella in the early 90s of the last century is the one who seduced the writer and lawyer Ulises Bértolo. Very closely inspired by the story of Ana Garrido, he has written the novel La dama del norte (Planeta, 2023).

“I didn’t want to write another story about drug trafficking. I needed to capture the emotions of the protagonist to be able to write the book in the first person”, the author comments to this newspaper. Thus, determined to tell the life story of the largest Spanish drug trafficker known to date, he devoted himself to an intense schedule of more than a year of interviews, exchanges of WhatsApp messages and dozens of emails.

“The first date I had with her was in Malaga, on a terrace on Calle Larios. I met a woman with a completely normal appearance, but with a very direct gaze and very used to being in control of the conversations”, explains Bértolo. Ana Garrido was on provisional release at the time. Today she is back in prison for a case that she had pending, after having exhausted all resources. She already enjoys some permits again.

“I have more than paid [the debt to justice]. I think that if we put comparative grievances, society would be indebted to me ”, Garrido comments to this newspaper. It may be that when she speaks of “comparative grievances” she is referring to people who have committed more serious crimes, according to her, and who have less punishment or that she does so with respect to the others convicted as a result of the Temple operation, directed by the judge Baltasar Garzón, for which she was imprisoned in 1999. Although all those involved, Galicians and Colombians, swore they would remain silent, they soon began to make cross confessions to seek better treatment by the Prosecutor’s Office.

In an almost biblical tone, Garrido refers to his feelings after the betrayal: “I feel anger, hatred and bitterness. In this world, there are no friends. I think that: every clown in his place and every king on his throne. As an acquaintance said, sit on the threshold of your door and you will see the corpse of your enemy pass by. May anger and anger not cloud our reason. Protect me and free me, Lord, from my friends, because I am free from my enemies”.

“Ana believed that money was going to make her immune to all the evils that could exist. One of her first confessions was that she really liked money. A lot, she insisted. I think that the search for quick money was a way out of the hard events of the childhood that she lived through, that hardened her, and that are told in the book”, comments Bértolo.

The writer stresses that “all the characters in the novel are inspired by real people.” Profiles very typical of that Spain of the big ball are put on the sideboard of your reading in which “everyone wanted to get rich” and where urban reclassifications took place.

Ana Garrido, also known in the drug trafficking environment as La rubia, takes stock and regrets having lost her freedom and “good times that are not recovered.” She hopes to be able to recover some of those lost occasions with her family; Her only son is very important in her life and in the plot of the novel.

“Now I am waiting to find the root of my mistakes”, concludes the woman who could reign within the Spanish narco.