The Dropper

The Dropper: David Avendaño Ballina, Las Goteras, and Predatory Murder in Mexico

In the sprawling nightlife districts of Mexico City, a quiet and methodical man built one of the most efficient killing operations in the history of organised crime. David Avendaño Ballina, known by the deceptively mundane alias "el Hamburguesa", directed a criminal syndicate that exploited the sex trade, the culture of social shame, and the pharmacological properties of common eye drops to drug, rob, and murder at least seventy men across a decade of undetected homicide. Operating between 1997 and 2007 through a network of semi-autonomous cells stretching across six Mexican states, his organisation Las Goteras became the most lethal profit-motivated killing enterprise in modern Mexican history, positioning Avendaño Ballina as the country's third most prolific killer.

Drawing on judicial records, forensic analysis, and criminological research, The Dropper reconstructs the full architecture of this extraordinary criminal enterprise, its organisational design, its pharmacological method, its exploitation of institutional failure and cultural silence, and its decade-long evasion of justice. From the hotel rooms where seventy men died to the courtroom where a sentence of nine hundred years was eventually imposed, this is the definitive account of a case that changed Mexican forensic science, challenged the boundaries of serial killer classification, and exposed the deadly intersection of organised crime and social hypocrisy.