Published March 04, 2011

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/03/04/mexico-charges-queen-pacific-money-laundering/

Mexico City –  A judge ordered reputed drug trafficker Sandra Avila Beltran, known as "The Queen of the Pacific," bound over for trial on charges of money laundering, the Mexican Attorney General's Office said.

Though sentenced last month to a year in prison for weapons offenses, Avila Beltran would ordinarily have been released based on the more than three years she has already spent behind bars.

Instead, she was transferred earlier this week from a jail in Mexico City to a federal prison pending a decision on a U.S. request for her extradition.

Avila Beltran and then-boyfriend Juan Diego Espinosa, a Colombian national known as "El Tigre," were arrested on Sept. 28, 2007, for allegedly smuggling nine tons of cocaine into the Pacific port of Manzanillo.

In December, a Mexican judge quashed drug-trafficking and racketeering charges against the pair, citing a lack of evidence.

Espinosa, meanwhile, was extradited to the United States in 2009.

The new indictment against Avila Beltran is based on evidence that the money she has in the Mexican financial system was derived from "illicit activities," the AG's office said.

Reputed to be a key intermediary between Colombian cocaine producers and Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Avila Beltran is the most prominent woman in the hyper-macho world of the Mexican drug trade.

After her arrest, the Mexican press compared Avila Beltran to the main character in Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel "La Reina del Sur" (The Queen of the South) and she inspired a popular "corrido," or ballad, by Los Tigres del Norte.