Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is a name that stands out in the world of organized crime, on par with figures such as Al Capone and Pablo Escobar. But during El Chapo’s trial in 2018–2019, one woman was named on the indictment – Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, the highest-ranking woman known in Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. This revelation captured the attention of journalist Deborah Bonello, sparking years of investigative work into the often overlooked roles women play in Latin American cartels.  

Through her research into Mexico’s powerful criminal organizations, Bonello uncovered stories that defy stereotypes, where women were not merely victims or bystanders but active participants in organized crime. They were mothers and grandmothers, yet also leaders within criminal networks, overseeing drug trafficking and even ordering murders. In the fifth episode of our podcast series Underworlds with Mark Shaw, the GI-TOC’s director sat down with Bonello to discuss her latest book, Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels, and explore how her work reshapes our understanding of women’s agency in the world of organized crime. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Mark Shaw: Deborah, it’s an absolute pleasure to speak to you. I’ve read a copy of your book. I picked it up in a Miami bookstore – and it’s a signed copy, which I was very happy to get. It’s a fascinating book with lots of characters. Actually, that struck me reading through it. It’s an easy read, but there’s people coming up, women coming up throughout the book. Would you mind describing some of the key characters and why you chose them, just to give everybody a sense of what the book is about? 

Deborah Bonello: The first woman who came across my radar was Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, who is the highest-ranking woman known today in the Sinaloa Cartel. I came across her because the El Chapo trial, which was rolling out in 2018–2019, was super high profile. At the time, I was the bureau chief for VICE Latin America, and we were covering that a lot. I noticed that there was only a single woman’s name on that indictment, and so started looking into her. At first, I thought, ‘Oh, well, maybe no one’s written about her because there’s no information about her.’ But then, as I looked, I found that her entire criminal history was on PACER [Public Access to Court Electronic Records]. Guadalupe was in her late fifties, early sixties by the time she was arrested. She looked like your classic Mexican grandmother. Nothing eye-catching about her. She didn’t really fit into these stereotypes that have defined how we understand women in organized crime – the mob wife, the trafficked victim, the girl with the golden gun. She was none of those things.  

When I started digging into her, I found she had migrated, undocumented, to the US in the late 1980s, early 1990s. She got into drug trafficking in California. She did her time there and got sent home. Hers was a very typical migrant story, not so much the drug tracking conviction, but just this movement between Mexico and the US. Then she got back into it after her brother, who was working with El Chapo’s family, got arrested, and then she got pulled in, and everything was there. 

When I was talking to people in the US about her case, someone else told me about Digna Valle, who was a Honduran trafficking matriarch based on Honduras’s border with Guatemala. She was arrested in 2013, and subsequently helped bring down her entire trafficking clan. The DEA at one point was very focused on Honduras and its role as a major cocaine transit hub in Latin America. Again, Digna was in her late fifties. She was the eldest of 13 siblings. She totally looked like a grandmother, not someone who you would look twice on in the street or suspect of being involved in the cocaine business. Those were really the two cases that brought me in and started having me question what our understanding was of women in organized crime. 

By that time, I’d been in Latin America for about 15 years, working for newspapers as well as think tanks such as the GI-TOC and InSight Crime. I had seen that the visible women were very much the Emma Coronel-type women, who is, for those who don’t know, El Chapo’s wife – young, very pretty. She’s this archetype of ‘mob wife’. 

MS: This is the big message of the book, right? How would you summarize it in two sentences? We’ve discounted the role of women in organized crime, no?  

DB: Yes, the book is about how women are generally sexualized and minimalized in organized crime. 

MS: And why? Part of the thing I get is because its men looking at organized crime – that’s one issue. Is it as bad as in some ways the book portrays? 

DB: My feeling is that because organized crime is so shadowy, we are a little bit behind, generally, in terms of our understanding of it. If we look at things like banking and football and tech, we have seen in the last two decades, women very much rise to the top and come to the forefront. I think it’s natural that it would take us a while to notice that in organized crime. But yes, I do think there’s a male lens to the way that organized crime has been documented, which is a tendency to minimize and sexualize women who are there. They tend to be discounted because they’re the wives or the mothers or the sisters. But organized crime in Latin America is absolutely clan-based. So men are brought in to organized crime in the same way as women are, via marriage, via blood ties. And men tend not to be minimalized for being brought in that way. So it seemed like very much a double standard to me. And so in the book, I argue, if we take off this lens that we’ve been using that sees women as victims and as co-opted and forced into things, then we have a clearer understanding of their role within these clan-based organizations.  

MS: What’s amazing about the book is that the women seem so ordinary. I think you used the word earlier – ‘granny-like’. This lady is like your average granny. But clearly, to survive in a criminal milieu, she kills people, she traffics drugs. I mean, this is a really tough business. The women you interview are very ordinary, but there’s something quite tough about them, I suppose, that emerges. But it’s this weird mix of these two things. 

DB: I think in part that’s surprising because we have been so conditioned by the legend and ‘bombasticness’ of organized crime by the narratives we see in mainstream media. You look at Narcos: Mexico, you look at any of the coverage of mob-run New York. You have these larger-than-life male characters who are the biggest and the toughest. I think that’s very much trained us into how we understand people in the drug trade. Really, for people like Digna’s family, for example, these are very humble, poor, agricultural parts of Latin America, where there are these porous international borders. Digna’s family started off as cattle contrabandistas, smuggling cattle across the border. And then they realize they can make US$800 000 for every tonne of cocaine they move across the border. So it is a financial no-brainer. But these people are not the Scarfaces, the people at the top of the chain. But also, I think it emphasizes how there’s such a plethora of people and roles and ranks of organized crime, and that what we see in terms of the ‘Hollywoodification’, especially of the drug trade, is really just the tip of the iceberg.  

MS: You recount this very interesting story, from a research perspective and from a personal perspective, how you began. You met a professor who had written a book who actually made contact with you. When you began writing it, did you know how it would end up? Did the case that you put together just grow stronger and surprise even you? Because it’s a very powerful read. You finish it and you do, in some ways, have a different lens. You have the sense that there’s a set of characters that are missing, that have been missing for many of us working in the area. 

DB: I think I always knew that I wanted it to be based on this perspective and suggestion of a new narrative in terms of how we’re looking at women in the drug trade. Part of that was personal in the sense that I’ve covered organized crime for 20 years in Mexico and I’m usually one of the few women in the room. When I told people in my field what I was doing, the assumption was, ‘Oh, you’re writing about the wives. Oh, you’re writing about the girlfriends’. This idea that no woman would be there were it not for power being passed or shared.  

MS: And what was your answer to those questions? ‘No, I’m not’ or ‘Don’t be crazy’ or…?  

DB: My answer to those questions was ‘That’s why we need the book’, because people are still understanding women based on that assumption. For me, the issue of agency is really important because I think there has always been this idea that when women are there, they’re there because they didn’t really have much of a choice. This idea that women could be ambitious, strategic, violent… just seems still in this day and age – even though we have seen women’s’ role in traditionally male-dominated fields like football and banking excel – I think there is still this fundamental discomfort with seeing women who are mothers and the ‘family nurturer’ and the base, also being delinquent and bringing their kids into the drug trade and sending out hits on people. I think that’s something that people find really fundamentally uncomfortable about that still. Part of the book is data-based, and I did a lot of research, but it’s also, as you said, a very personal take on a field that’s just been dominated by these very stale narratives for a long time. 

MS: If you haven’t read the book, Deborah recounts making connections, making interviews, her own questioning and thoughts, and there’s some funny bits in here, too, if you don’t mind me saying. I think of your journey through writing the book – it’s very personal, which makes it very readable. I think the question people ask a lot around these true crime books, which are also analytical, how did you make contact with people and how did you make them talk? You give some hints in the book, but talk us through that. How do you make contact with powerful women, organized crime figures? Do you appeal to the gender argument as you would for a business executive? Or what’s your line in?

DB: The criteria that I used to choose the women who I focused on was a lot based on access. I decided to focus mostly on women whose cases were going through the US justice system. A) because in the Latin American justice system, it’s very hard to get hold of court transcripts, indictments, and any documentation that helps build scenes and really understand the case. And also, I wanted to focus on women who were no longer key in the criminal landscape. I live in Mexico City, I work in Latin America. I had no interest in poking the bear next to me. I am very practical about risk and the risks I take are very calculated. I don’t think anyone wants to cover a story they’re not going to come back from, because then you just don’t get to write it. But it was also based on the access issue.   

Some of the women I did have access to – [for example] Marixa Lemus, who was a part of the narco-political nexus on the border with Guatemala and El Salvador. She was a smaller-time player than, say, Guadalupe and Digna, but I did get in to see her in a high-security prison in Guatemala. In the end, I ended up doing it via a non-profit that works with women in prison who are very neglected and invisible. I knew that asking the Guatemalan government for an interview with the woman who has the moniker of being Guatemala’s version of El Chapo… I knew it was very unlikely they were going to give me access to her.  

Of all the other women who, at the time that I was writing the book, were mostly in either the US penitentiary system or awaiting deportation after having done their time, some of them responded to my letters to speak to them. Some of them had their hands tied because if you are convicted in the US for a crime and you’re a foreign national, you’re automatically tagged for deportation. If you want to stay, you need to convince an immigration judge that you deserve a special visa for that. Immigration judges – as we know, immigration is such a hot political potato right now in the US – don’t look kindly on former female traffickers bragging to journalists about their criminal exploits. A lot of the women, at the point that I was writing the book, just didn’t really have an interest in speaking to me about anything, they were going to disadvantage themselves for speaking to me. 

This is why I chose cases that had a lot of documentation around them. A lot of the reporting was based on sometimes speaking to the women, corresponding with them. In the case of Digna, I went to her town and I spent the day there with women who knew her and speaking to people who had worked with her and her family, prosecutors, immigration lawyers, people who were in the periphery of the world of these women as well. And just innovating a little when you can’t actually sit down and speak to them. But I have to admit, there was some frustration for me because I did feel like I really wanted to speak to Guadalupe and Digna about what that experience was like for them. I don’t know whether I would have intellectualized the concept of gender as much with them in the sense that they’re not coming from a world where it would necessarily have been political or gendered for them. I think a lot of them came up in a world where they could have said no and not chosen to get involved, but I don’t think it was a feminist act, if that makes sense. 

MS: Sometimes when you’re trying to interview criminal figures, you say, ‘You need to tell your history’. You’re trying to appeal to people’s ego, in a way. That sounds terrible, but I think it’s true. ‘You have a story to tell. Will you tell it to me?’ Were you making a gender argument? Did you say, ‘Look, there’s a story about women in organized crime that isn’t being told, and I’m trying to tell that’?  

DB: Yes, I did. 

MS: What was the response? 

DB: The response was no response. Then after the book came out, some of the women reached out to me and were not terribly pleased about the coverage and about the attention. It’s hard to generalize about women in organized crime, but my feeling was that the majority of the women didn’t like the attention. They don’t want to be immortalized by Netflix. They just want to sink into the woodwork and disappear. There were some exceptions to that, but that was my finding, generally. There was an indignation on their part that I would have the audacity to put their cases out there without necessarily the understanding that if you are convicted on drug trafficking, your story is fair game because all of the information is public. 

MS: Do you think men are different? Do you think men have more of an ego? 

DB: I think men and women come in all shapes and forms. I could never speak for all women, just as you could never speak for all men. I think there are so many different types of personalities and egos in the way that we approach this. If I can make some regional comparisons, if you look at Colombia now, and you look at Mexico, Colombia is a lot less violent in terms of its organized crime landscape than Mexico. Mexico hasn’t quite gotten the memo that violence brings attention. It brings heat from the government, it brings press coverage, it has all sorts of ramifications, even though it is also a useful currency in the forms of generating fear and compliance and getting people to do what you want. I think we all as individuals make those decisions, and some of the women were more violent than others. Some of the women enjoyed having the power that allows them to be these significant pawns in their communities. Other women just wanted to enjoy the money from organized crime and not be on the front of the newspaper. It varied a lot.  

MS: Can I ask a serious question, which I thought about a lot interviewing and writing about people myself? I’m not saying you did this, actually you’ve got a very good balance, but just generally your view. Do we run the risk of glorifying people? One of the attempts is to humanize people, there’s an older woman, she’s a grandmother, etc. In this process of covering them, is there’s a risk of glorification somehow? 

DB: One of the tensions in the book was that I was impressed by the power that these women had acquired themselves, without glorifying it because they are essentially working for viscerally violent organizations. But after covering the drug trade for 20 years, I do try to stray from this American, DEA narrative about organized crime in Latin America, which is based on a lot of black and white narratives: ‘these big, mostly brown, criminal groups are forcing – now, especially with the opioid epidemic – illicit drugs onto America’s innocent, young, white kids’. I think, ultimately, the drug trade is a product of capitalism. It is a consequence of grinding poverty. The people who are drawn into it are not these one-dimensional, nasty, bad ‘men’ who are just trying to ruin America’s youth and what have you. I think that the drug trade is extremely complex, but it is a symptom of the world that we have created for ourselves.   

The way that organized crime is represented in mainstream narratives, they would have us believe that the men and women leading these organizations are just terrible people with no capacity for having their own families and having relationships. All they want to do is generate harm. And I just think it’s infinitely more complicated than that. And part of the book was trying to create a nuanced and multidimensional understanding of the women who get involved. Yes, they’re traffickers, but they’re also mothers and matriarchs and sisters and they’re part of these rural communities that in some ways really looked up to them and admired them. And they’re also benefactors. If you go to Sinaloa and you talk to people about ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, a lot of people will tell you that he was a hero to them. He has been buying poppy paste and marijuana off impoverished farmers for decades and filling the void often left by the role of the state in Latin America. I think all these factors make the people involved much more interesting and nuanced than traditional narratives might allow for. 

MS: The reason we thought of doing the [podcast] series, which means I have to read a lot of books on organized crime – which is good – is that there’s such a growth in the number of non-fiction books about illicit markets, criminal groups, etc. Some of them academic, some of them in the non-fiction true crime genre, some of them a mix, I would say yours is a mix. What should non-fiction books achieve in this area? What should we aim to achieve? Is it to achieve that more nuanced overview as we go forward? There really is an increase in the number of studies, books in the area. What should we be looking to achieve in your view? 

DB: I’d be interested to hear your view on this, Mark, actually. As we look at what we’ve seen roll out in terms of the drug war in my region in the last five decades now, I think even someone from the DEA will tell you that the drug war cannot be won. This simplified idea of good against bad, the evil drug lords trying to profit off the death and suffering of America’s youth. Humanity has been trying to alter its state of consciousness and numb pain since it was created. The Prohibition model and the Kingpin strategy, I think we all know, are having a very limited impact on destroying the drug trade, and certainly in some ways generating ever more violent environments. As you take out these leaders, be they male or female, you create power vacuums, and then violence explodes as fractured organizations struggle for power. The point of the book, and what I think that we do need to see more on, is less of a punitive understanding of how organized crime is tackled and why organized crime exists, this idea that people are just bad, to understand that for most people, it’s a social and economic opportunity.  

I think if we can understand that and take less of a stigmatized approach to it and understand, for women especially, that when women are put in prison for low-level drug trafficking crimes – the female population in Latin American prisons has mushroomed in the last decade – they are often either taking children in with them or leaving children on the outside. The loss of those primary caregivers has a fundamentally different impact on society as those kids are impacted by their incarcerated mothers. I think a lot of people would argue, ‘If she was trafficking 5 kilos of marijuana, why shouldn’t she go to jail?’ But it’s such a small, tiny drop in the ocean. Is that really going to take away the drug trade? I think we need to just have some new ideas and thinking. And my hope is that by creating a more rounded, nuanced picture of things, we might start having some new ideas. I was in SOUTHCOM [US Southern Command] in Miami towards the end of last year and spoke to people who are going to be the future decision-makers in SOUTHCOM, which is the part of the US military that executes a lot of the anti-narcotic strategy in the region. 

I was in a room of 50 people. One of them was a woman, Jamaican, amazing woman, and the rest were guys. After the presentation, they were like, ‘What do we do about this? How do we solve this problem?’ For me, I feel like it’s not about having a single policy approach. This thinking has to permeate all of the thinking around anti-narcotics or creating incentives that instead of punishing, discourage; more preventative, less punitive in terms of understanding the dynamics that drive people into it in the first place. 

MS: I know it sounds like a strange response, but to go back to the question, a flowering of research, non-fiction on this provides nuance. Do you think the people in SOUTHCOM would read this? 

DB: I hope so. I certainly sold a lot of books that day. The book has actually been twofold, we were talking before about your autographed copy. I’ve done a lot of appearances at book festivals, and I think there’s people who are readers who just enjoy having their minds expanded and thinking about things in a new way. I do hope that there is a more academic and law enforcement side of the world that’s consuming the book, because I do think that in the world in general, we are what we see or we see what we are. The way that we perceive and conceptualize problems is the way that we approach and attack them. I think that might sound a little bit esoteric in terms of what we’re talking about. But I do think if you walk into a room and it’s your belief and understanding that women are pawns in a man’s game, you’re really not going to ask the women many questions or any revealing questions. I think we have to disrupt the way that we’re approaching law enforcement and documentation around this issue. That comes from picking up the snowstorm and shaking it.  

MS: Another question on identity. Does it matter that you’re a Brit? In a way, I know you’ve been there a long time, you’re like an insider outsider, I’m guessing. Is that helpful? Is that a hindrance? Do people want Brits asking them questions in Latin America? Does that make you more objective or does this make no difference at all? 

DB: I think being a foreigner is a protection in a way. As you know, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. There is, sadly, a wave of violence that is mostly affecting Mexican journalists, not foreign journalists. I think being foreign does afford me some protection. I was born in Malta, brought up in the UK. I can’t say I belong to any one nationality. I was always one of those girls that never really fit in with what was expected of us. That conditioning, as you know, starts very young. Gender-based conditioning about how you should be in school, what you should wear, what you should be doing with your time.  

MS: And you say some of this in the book, that’s why I’m getting at it.  

DB: Yes, I think I was always used to being a bit of an outsider wherever I was. And I think that life experience also makes you naturally question, why are there these expectations and what are the alternatives? Having grown up as something of a mixture of lots of different cultures and places, I think that helped bring my perspective. We are now living in a world where a lot of people are not born and dying in the same place. But certainly when I was growing up, I was more of an outlier. Most of the people that I would be with are people who were living where they were born, and they were going to stay there for the rest of their lives. I’m grateful for that experience, but I’m also… I think one of my anxieties about publishing the book was, am I going to get pummelled for it? Because part of it is questioning the status quo. But I do feel like it’s been very gracefully received and has been absorbed as part of this existing literature and a new perspective in this existing literature.  

And it was never written with the intent of ‘everything we know is wrong and I’m right’. It was more like, let’s just try and expand this a bit and take a slightly different approach to how we’re seeing women in the game. 

MS: What was the most critical thing anyone said to you about the book?  

DB: There was this idea that it could have been more data-driven in terms of…  

MS: Just from academics?  

DB: Yes. With the profiles, I really focused on trying to get very personalized individual ideas of these women rather than doing very data-based analysis on how many convictions there have been for high-ranking women in criminal organizations. I didn’t have the means to do that statistical analysis. Yes, there are studies about women for low-level trafficking offences in prison, but a lot of the high-ranking women are hidden in those government stats. But I actually stand by it because I think this isn’t really necessarily a data issue. For me, it was more about trying to understand what the individual dynamics of those women were and what drove them into the trade, and try and use that as something representative for women as a whole.  

MS: Can I just turn to two last sets of issues? The first is how you write. I think people are always interested in this. This is really tightly argued, you’re a journalist, you write a lot, you’ve written for us. How did you put this together? Because it’s stories that go back and forth, but there’s this narrative that flows through. How did you achieve that? Did you work for long stretches and throw away a whole lot, did you get frustrated, or did you just bash it all out in two weeks? What was the process? 

DB: I had the idea probably three years before I handed in the first draft. There was a lot of thinking and research, but the writing probably took place over about six months. I was working for VICE at the time. I went down to a three-day week, so I was working that time. Writing, I would say 30 per cent is putting words on a page, and then the other 70 per cent is messing around with that and adding to it and editing yourself. I was convinced by my agent that I had to put myself in it, and there is a lot of me in it, and that felt very unnatural to me. I had been a reporter by then for more than 20 years, wasn’t very used to writing in the first person. I have to admit, I had a slightly grim view of the journalists who put themselves at the centre of the narrative. That was a real challenge. 

MS: A grim view because this is self-promoting or…? 

DB: There can be this tortured self-importance sometimes in the way that we see journalists place themselves in narratives. I was terrified of that. I didn’t want to be the reporter who made it about her. It did feel like a minefield, and I very much wanted my analysis to be something that helped enlighten or juxtapose the experience of those women who would be probably the typical reader. The people who are typically reading Narcas are not people who are like the women in the book. They’re probably people who are more like me, who have led a lot more of a pedestrian life than getting into the drug trade at the age of 15. That was one of the challenges, especially there’s a chapter in there about the beauty culture around women in the narco business and how Emma Coronel, El Chapo’s wife, has essentially spearheaded this movement of women in Sinaloa and in other parts of the world who get surgery to empower themselves in a way that associates them with that world. You’re not necessarily a narco wife, but you look like one. That means people assume you have status and money and power. 

Speaking to women in that world was really fascinating to me because I’d just come from such a different way of thinking about aesthetics and the idea that you go to a doctor and have him shape you like that is very much… I mean, that is generally becoming much more accepted in society, but it’s on steroids in states like Sinaloa. I think social media has really amplified that decision-making process and that lifestyle, which is making it much more aspirational and desirable. In that chapter of the book, I tried to be really honest about my reaction to that without being judgmental. It wasn’t my intention to be like ‘this is a preposterous pastime and aspiration, why are women doing it?’ It was more like, it does go contrary to so many of the other tenets of feminism that we’re seeing and other understanding of women’s place in the world. But at the same time, I think that juxtaposition is really interesting. The intention was to just create and emphasize the contrast rather than condemn it. 

MS: It’s a very interesting part of the book. I’ve read about it elsewhere, but it describes it really well, and you don’t pass judgment. I’m guessing what you think, but you don’t say it, but the book tells why and how people do it. It draws together some of the story at the end rather well about individual aspirations, the consumer, the desire to fit in, what money does. Just to close off, a question around what we’re getting wrong. I would say we’re the biggest global think tank now on organized crime research. [We have] about 90 research projects underway. Are we not doing enough on the gender angle? What should we do more? What are the gaps? Walking away from the book and your engagement with many people… I think that’s always a useful process to get ideas. What more do we need to do? Where are there areas that are underexplored from your perspective now, having done this work? 

DB: I think there is a very strong strain of thinking within the perception of women in organized crime, which is that of a victim. When we talk about young men in organized crime compared to young women, we tend to differentiate between their level of agency. Actually I think both men and women are pulled into organized crime for the same reasons. 

MS: And what is the reason, in your view? Wealth, money…? 

DB: In countries like Mexico, I do understand why the drug trade is attractive to both men and women, especially from the lower social economic stratums. It offers empowerment and money and a certain amount of status in countries where social mobility is really out of the reach of a lot of people. So I do understand its attractions. But I think this idea that women only do it because they have to or because they’re not given a choice is both patronizing to women and then also insinuates that the way that we perceive men getting into it is different. But actually, I think there’s a lot of overlap. There are, of course, different social dynamics and economic dynamics affecting men and women. But I think we need to be a little bit more open-minded in terms of women’s agency. I’m not talking about blame. I think this is also part of the problem in the way that organized crime is documented, people who are arrested or people who are killed in the process of their role in organized crime are perceived as asking for it or being responsible for their own demise. That takes away the complexity of the decision-making process of getting into the drug trade. I think we need to move away from the idea of blame and focus more on agency as this very important element to how people get into organized crime in the first place. I know that sounds a bit esoteric as well, but I do think agency is a major factor for women. I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘I didn’t have a choice’.  

MS: Agency is interesting because what you’ve done is you tell the story of people’s lives. I don’t want to say the word ‘criminal career’ captures it, but basically the sense of how people steered and made life decisions and got sucked in and it became much more dangerous and then took choices, etc. This is very interesting. That is just a personal reflection, which is why the book is so interesting. To respond to your data point – a lot of academic research is people-less, partly because it has to be, because it’s so hard with university ethics, etc, to do interviews. What this book brings is, in fact, the opposite. It’s driven by a set of characters that tell you a story of a missing part of the debate and I guess the bigger research question.   

So, super read, Deborah. Thank you very much for talking and answering the questions. Really a huge pleasure to have you on an important issue and an important book, and we are very grateful.  

DB: I’m delighted. Thanks for having me.