Nidia Flores (1978-) was a Mexican beauty queen and drug trafficker who served as the head of the Santa Blanca Cartel's smuggling operations.
Biography[]
Nidia Flores was born into poverty in Mexico in 1978, and she lost a dozen beauty pageants before she finally started to win, winning the Miss Mexico Beauty Pageant at the age of 18. She used the scholarships she won from those pageants to pay for business classes, but she found that the Santa Blanca Cartel had funded the pageants and soon fell in with Rodrigo Carlos Pérez Morales, the drug lord known as "El Sueño." She used her looks and a smoldering sensuality to advance from being a pageant queen to arm candy for narcos and eventually El Sueño's head of smuggling and his adoptive daughter of sorts (despite El Sueño being only a year older). Flores had many relationships with both women and men before meeting Ronaldo "El Boquita" Villa and conceiving a child with him after a one-night stand. Flores married Villa and raised their daughter Valeria, while she also ensured the packaging and delivery of the cartel's cocaine from their base in Bolivia. Flores moved into a multimillion-dollar hacienda near Barvechos, Bolivia and was a frequent speaker on DJ Perico's Santa Blanca Radio.
In 2019, the United States launched Operation Kingslayer with the goal of dismantling and destroying the cartel, and Flores was one of their chief targets. The Americans shut down the cartel's smuggling operations and destroyed a convoy she intended to send to Mexico to reassure the cartel's investors of its capabilities. As a result, El Sueño lost his faith in the woman he called his "queen," even after she killed her husband and presented his head to El Sueño as a sign of atonement. El Sueño ordered Flores' death, but Major Anthony Perryman's Ghost Recon team apprehended Flores and her daughter Valeria at her hacienda before they could be harmed. While initially opposed to cooperating with the CIA, Flores was persuaded to testify against El Sueño after CIA agent Karen Bowman threatened to place her daughter in the foster care system, where she would forget her mother. Flores agreed to testify in exchange for immunity and witness protection for her and her daughter.