Ten Thunders

Ten Thunders (Balam Cartel Leader) - The Medellin and Cali cartels get all the press, but they’re quickly becoming old news. Buried deep in the forests of Columbia, a small but powerful new group harvests the purest cocaine in the world and smuggles it past the tightest security devised. Few DEA agents have even heard this new cartel’s name, but its imprint — the black jaguar — has become infamous among the white death pipeline, so infamous that even the most talkative informers speak nothing of it except the name of its leader — Ten Thunders, the Lord of the Bleeding Night.

Despite the name and common belief, Ten Thunders is a woman. Not that you can tell easily by looking at her — this Bastet is a hard, nasty character, and the ruthlessness she brings to her job has etched itself into her face. She usually wears men’s clothing — often army fatigues or tailored suits — but occasionally “lowers herself” to dress in traditional Colombian woman’s garb. Her personality is rigid and her voice is harsh. The penalty for disobeying her is a quick trip to the Hunting Gallery — an underground maze where she stalks the offender in one of her cat forms, devours him, and drags the remains to the entrance as a warning. Although she looks like a woman in her mid-30s, Ten Thunders carries herself like an avenging Inca ghost.

Ten Thunders may seem like a cold, sadistic, evil bitch. She may be all of those things and more, but she does have her reasons. Before she took control of the cartel that she now leads, the people — her people — were hungry, taxed by a corrupt government, and afraid of the sudden disappearances that mark so many Central American nights. The previous cartel leader was a harsh and greedy man named Quabo, who tortured the people for fun. Ten Thunders, who swears she emerged full-grown from the jungle night, ripped out Quabo’s throat and tossed his body to the scavengers. The same punishment fell on anyone who disagreed with the woman’s commands. Soon, she had the whole cartel to herself.

Why does she grow and sell drugs? It’s simple, really; before the cocaine trade, her people were starving. Overseas, fat and undeserving foreigners blew their money on chemical poisons, then worsened her people’s poverty so they could buy more drugs. Why, then, shouldn’t honest working people profit from making the poisons that the fat ones so willingly ingest? It’s killing two rats with one stone, really — her people get the rich ones’ money, and the rich ones kill themselves off. Nothing wrong with that, at least not as far as Ten Thunders could see. So now she runs a cocaine cartel, one of the largest in Columbia, slaughters her rivals, enriches her people, and gives the fat ones what they want: death by ecstasy.