"Meet Five Smoking Hot Narco-Novias of Mexico's Drug Cartels," says a February headline on a website named Business Insider. There they are Angie Sanclamente, the Colombian lingerie model and cocaine smuggler captured in Argentina, Laura Elena Zuniga, a former Miss Sinaloa, Juliana Sossa Toro, the Colombian model captured in Mexico City with her capo boyfriend "El J.J." and the glamorous Sandra Avila Beltran, the "Queen of the Pacific." Avila re-entered the tabloid news recently when she reportedly received a Botox treatment while behind bars in Mexico.

The Narconovia has become an icon of a drug conflict that has altered the identity of countless communities, from the U.S. border to the tips of the Andes. The cartel women are a popular fetish, their images appearing across the mediasphere, stunning and sexualized. They personify beauty, criminality, wealth, victimization -- but in a male-dominated world, also agency -- all intersecting in the flesh.

Artist Carolyn Castaño is fascinated by the Narconovias, subjects of her work. Castaño is Colombian-American, making her distinctly aware of these and other semi-mythologized criminal figures from the international drug trade. She renders them in her recognizable style -- graphic, sharp, superflat yet also lavish with mixed-media embellishments, such as glitter, mirrors, and rhinestones.

Castaño's latest series, "Narco Venus," marks an evolution in her style. Her Narconovias are now anonymous, sumptuous bodies lying on fields of electric coca and poppy plants, lounging amid seductive marijuana leaves. They no longer stare straight ahead as in mugshots. They are nude and adorned with skulls. Streaks of indistinct rolled-on paint now disperse lines and forms, evoking the "dark grave" that awaits most players in the drug trade, even the pretty ones.

"I wanted to make something more evocative," Castaño says during a studio visit. "It's something dedicated to the girls, the women who are getting involved with narcotrafficking as lovers or girlfriends or wives or even drug "Queenpins" themselves."

The works are not decontextualized gestures of glorification. On the contrary, Castaño seeks to critique the allure that Narconovias have in the popular consciousness. Her paintings amplify the fetish, and in the process unmask the sociopolitical realities that make Narconovias modern idols of infamy. The skulls and psychotropic plants are one and the same, elements of the trade that pave the path of the Narconovias' inevitable downfall.

"I'm fascinated by them and also saddened by the state of this kind of Latin American feminism. Where is the empowered woman, post-feminism?" Castaño says. "I also think [they] reflect our own consumerist society, our desire for wanting power, designer goods, jewels, and doing whatever it takes."

Castaño's drug-trade women are nameless, yet more "real" than any news event or particular figure. The work confronts us with figures that are more implicated and dangerous than an oversaturated Hollywood celebrity, for example, those merely passive consumers of Latin American narcotics. Ultimately, the Narconovias are symbols of a widespread social failure -- the residue of a multinational industry that feeds an insatiable appetite for drugs in the U.S. -- and results in tens of thousands of dead a year south of the border. Many women are among the victims, both rich and poor, both beautiful and not.

—Daniel Hernandez
Writer and blogger Daniel Hernandez was formerly based in Los Angeles and now works in Mexico City.