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Reports vary as to how the shootout started. Some say La Catrina was found at a cartel safe house raided by Mexican troops; others say authorities came under fire when they took apart a roadblock at the town’s entrance. Either way, when the shooting stopped, the woman named after La Catrina, or the Dame of Death — a mythical female skeleton celebrated in Mexico during its famous Day of the Dead festival — was gravely hurt. Reportedly shot through the neck, she would soon die.

In grim footage online La Catrina can be seen being carried to a helicopter, her arm draped around one of the same soldiers she had been battling just moments earlier. A separate circulating clip shows a tattoo on her thigh that reads her nickname: “La Catrina.” In another, she is lying stricken on a stretcher, her jeans and black t-shirt caked in dust and blood.

Photo by Twitter

Local reports indicate that La Catrina’s cartel cell had launched a raid on police in the same part of Michoacán in October that saw 13 officers killed. The Daily Mail reported that footage from that October bloodbath showed policemen riddled with bullets, their vehicles set on fire.

Some reports indicate M2 was arrested in the same raid that killed his girlfriend, with others indicating he escaped. The raid happened in a violent region home to other cartels such as the Knights Templar and the Viagras.

Although it is unusual for women to rise to high rank within drug cartels, it is by no means unheard of. In recent decades, perhaps the most famous female to assume high gangland office was Griselda Blanco of Colombia. Known as the Black Widow, she oversaw her own drugs fiefdom that spanned from Colombia to Miami, beginning in the 1970s, and eventually served 19 years in prison in the U.S. Ironically, Blanco was killed at the age of 69 in 2012 by a sicario or assassin on a motorbike — a style of killing that she herself was rumoured to have first introduced to the streets of her home city of Medellín.

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