From a short stint as a beauty queen to becoming one of the world's few female cartel leaders, Enedina Arellano Félix's real life story is every bit as strange as the one that plays out on Narcos: Mexico. In Season 3, Enedina marries a lawyer, Claudio Vazquez, but her marriage is cut short when her husband is gunned down. From there, she's back to advising her brothers Benjamín and Ramón Arellano Félix, the leaders of the Tijuana cartel. By the end of the season, Ramón is dead and Benjamín is forced to live life on the run from both the DEA and rival cartels who want him dead, leaving Enedina as the de facto leader of their illicit operations.

In real life, Enedina remains something of a mystery. Just like on the show, she was a beauty queen in her younger years, before she attended a private university to obtain her accounting degree. As an accountant, she was in a unique position to help her family launder their drug money. But by the 2000s, she and her companies were blacklisted by the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act, as reported by Time.

This didn't slow Enedina down though. As more and more of her male relatives were either killed or arrested, she stepped up to run the cartel, and became known as La Jefa ("The Boss"), in the process. By 2008, Enedina and her nephew, Luis Fernando Sanchez Arellano, became co-leaders of the organization, and as the new boss, she steered the cartel away from violence and toward a business model focused on making money, first and foremost.