Very little is known about David Avendaño Ballina’s personal background before his criminal activities came to light. He operated mostly in Mexico City and was described as being calculated, manipulative, and connected to various prostitution and drug trafficking networks. The public came to know him by the nickname “El Hamburguesa”, but his early life, including his exact age, family history, or education remains largely undocumented in public sources.

What is known is that Avendaño emerged as the alleged leader of Las Goteras, a criminal gang of sex workers and their handlers that became infamous across Mexico for poisoning and robbing their clients. Alongside his wife, Claudia Castillos Maya, he is believed to have orchestrated a well-organized operation that lasted for a full decade without serious police interference.

His rise as a criminal overlord reflects not only the ineffectiveness of law enforcement during that era, but also the socio-political chaos of Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when drug wars, government corruption, and blurred lines between organized crime and political power plagued the country.

From 1997 to 2007, David Avendaño Ballina led an infamous robbery-murder syndicate known as “Las Goteras” (named after the eye drops used to drug their victims). The group operated mostly in bars, clubs, and cheap hotels in Mexico City, but their activities spread across other states. Their main targets were men, usually those leaving clubs drunk, alone, or with sex workers.

Their modus operandi was as disturbing as it was effective. Members, mostly women posing as sex workers, would flirt with and lure victims to hotels or secluded spaces. Once alone, the women offered the men strong alcohol (usually tequila or vodka) laced with benzodiazepines or cyclopentolate, compounds found in certain ophthalmological drops.

This mixture would rapidly suppress the victim’s nervous system, leading to confusion, drowsiness, and often death by cardio-respiratory failure. The victims were then robbed, sometimes stripped of their clothing or dignity, and left to die. The bodies were often discovered hours later, and due to the substances used, many deaths were initially mistaken as overdoses or alcohol-related accidents.

While many victims died, others survived, often suffering serious side effects like blindness, shock, or neurological damage. However, due to shame, fear of public exposure, or fear of the police, many survivors never reported the incidents, allowing the gang to keep operating freely.

In May 2007, authorities captured a major cell of 18 Goteras members, 11 men and 7 women. Under interrogation, they identified David Avendaño as their leader. On February 12, 2008, after nearly a year of investigation, Avendaño was finally arrested. His capture was widely publicized, but his full conviction status has remained legally unclear, with rumors suggesting he may not have been successfully prosecuted as the group’s mastermind.

In February 2009, after the deaths of two professional wrestlers in a Mexico City hotel (killed by the same method: alcohol and benzodiazepine poisoning), it was feared that Las Goteras were still active, despite Avendaño’s arrest. However, subsequent arrests of María de los Ángeles Sánchez Rueda and Estela González Calva confirmed that these were copycat murders, not directly linked to the original gang.

Despite this, some believed Avendaño’s arrest was political theater, a convenient move by the government to show results in their ongoing war against organized crime, without properly dismantling the entire network. As of the last public reports, he remains imprisoned, though his exact legal status and current condition remain undisclosed.