Sara’s story spans nearly four decades of incarceration. It is glamour during an LGBT party afternoon at a capital-city prison. It is being a “mother” to 29 cats, family to her fellow inmates, and a founding actress of the Prison Theater. She is a writer—of her own story and others’. She embodies humor, tears, and, at times, frustration. She is an advocate for the rights of incarcerated women. They call her the “Narco-Satanist”—the title she gave her own book—yet she maintains that today she is simply Sara, the woman behind the case file.
On any given day, she can be found sitting in a wheelchair she operates herself in one of the open-air areas of the Tepepan Women’s Social Reintegration Center. Now over sixty, with hair a mix of blonde and gray framing her face, she still retains traces of the youthful beauty she possessed when she met Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo—the moment her life changed forever.
Her expression is that of a frank, self-assured person—quintessentially Northern Mexican. She hails from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Standing 1.86 meters tall, her sturdy frame bears the marks of violence, aging, and confinement, yet she has lost neither her strong character nor her animated way of speaking.
She goes over—for the umpteenth time—what she has already stated in other forums (though not always reported accurately) and recounted in her own handwriting: how she gravitated toward Adolfo because of his knowledge of Santería; how he ended up kidnapping her; how she sought help; and how she ultimately found herself arrested and implicated.
Sara recounted the story of her nightmare in the book *Me dicen la narcosatánica* (“They Call Me the Narco-Satanist”). Written while incarcerated and published in 2000 with the help of writer Josefina Estrada, the book is one she still keeps copies of today. In the appendix, she also includes earlier testimonies from her co-defendants. They largely align with Sara’s accounts regarding her role, Constanzo, and statements obtained under torture.
There was already earlier evidence of her talent: Estrada’s prison workshops gave rise to the book *Mujeres de Oriente* (Women of the East)—a collection of tales from prison, memoirs, reflections, and short stories written by inmates at the facility where Sara spent her initial years of incarceration. She is one of the seventeen authors. “To Sara Aldrete, Sun of the East,” reads Estrada’s sole dedication on the opening page. Even back then, he frequently praised the writing of the native of Tamaulipas.
“It seems illogical to sleep when your privacy has been stolen, your solitude torn away, your dreams trampled, and your fantasies kicked aside… It’s a hell of a thing to be able to dream under those conditions—to return to a mattress that has sagged not from the weight of a body, but from the passage of time and the weight of pent-up dreams,” Sara wrote on one of those pages.
