“The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, is supposed to have stated this about the man who founded one of the most successful cartels in history.
Blanco was a vicious criminal mastermind whose name was among the most dreaded in Miami throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She killed individuals because “she didn’t like the way they looked at her”.
Now, the infamous drug boss has undergone a Hollywood makeover as Sofía Vergara from Modern Family teams up with the Narcos crime thriller crew to play the head of the criminal underworld.
The six-part Netflix series Griselda, which features high-stakes dramatic shootouts and neon nouveau riche splendor, portrays the legendary criminal as a smart, ambitious woman who is also hard-done.
The lady known as the “cocaine godmother” actually killed her three husbands, but the details of her tragic story are far less clear.
1943-born Blanco, who began his criminal career at the age of eleven, is said to have shot and killed a wealthy boy who had been abducted by her and whose parents had refused to give a ransom.
She moved illegally to New York in 1964, when she was 21 years old, together with her husband and three children, and she started selling marijuana.
It’s critical to keep in mind Griselda’s early identity. She was an immigrant who was raising her three children by herself. Vergara, who was also born in Colombia, told the BBC, “She had nothing, no education, no tools to survive.”
As a “single mother fleeing an abusive relationship, she can be relatable at times,” and because “everyone has an explanation, not an excuse, but an explanation,” showrunner Eric Newman stated that he aimed to “humanize the complex character” of Griselda Blanco.
“She works ten times harder to show herself as a woman in a world where men rule, and she uses her cunning and cleverness to outsmart the guys in her immediate vicinity. “People initially support her,” co-director Andrés Baiz continued.
Power turned her into a monster.
By 1970, Blanco had relocated to Miami and given the order to have her first husband assassinated. There, she met drug dealer Alberto Bravo, her second husband, who exposed her to an even darker aspect of the drug trade.
Because of her violent tendencies and daring method of drug smuggling—which involved flying young ladies from Colombia to the US with cocaine concealed in their bras and underwear—Blanco quickly rose to the position of head of the entire criminal organization.
Blanco became more vicious as competing gangs engaged in brutal clashes during the escalating drug battles in Miami. She killed her first husband in 1975 on the grounds that he was stealing money from her, and she also had her third husband killed in 1983 after he fled Miami with their child, Michael Corleone.
Blanco’s business grew rapidly, earning her the nickname “Black Widow” for her vicious and merciless actions. By the early 1980s, she was one of the richest and most feared women in the world, in charge of the monthly trafficking of 1.5 tonnes of cocaine into the US.
“I really think when Griselda first moved to Miami her intentions were all about protecting and taking care of her family, but along the way she got lost and the power and money turned her into a monster,” Vergara stated to the BBC.
Early in the 1980s, Blanco turned down a $15 million offer to give up her dominion from a rival cartel.
“Drew on outcasts”
Even though Blanco had ruled the Miami drug trade with an iron grip for twenty years, she knew that her position was vulnerable since she was a woman in a field that was dominated by sexist men. Because local dealers “would only accept a deal if it came out of a man’s mouth,” she once let a man to front her business.
After being charged with murder, Blanco decided to take the lead in running the company and made the most of her outsider status.
Roughly 135,000 Cubans traveled to the United States between April and September of 1980. Known as the Marielitos, a few of them had prior experience with drug trafficking, contract killing, and criminal groups.
Taking advantage of this, Blanco hired them to work for her. Her cartel created the Pistoleros, a gang of hitmen famous for their motorcycle assassinations.
Baiz claimed that Blanco “is an outsider and recruits all these other outsiders around her” and that she “knew what she was doing” in a field where trust was hard to come by and even harder to maintain.
“All of these characters are outcasts who don’t fit in with society’s norms. Knowing this, Griselda gives them the impression that they are a member of her family,” Baiz continued.
Vergara found solace in Blanco’s unconventional persona, as she perceived him to have “understood” parts of her experiences.
“I’m an immigrant, a mother, and a Colombian. Griselda was discriminated against since she was a woman, and she added, “I now realize that my accent requires extra effort and limits my prospects.
“A woman is not capable of such evil.”
Blanco’s criminal empire started to fall apart by the middle of the 1980s, and her reign of terror came to an abrupt end when she was apprehended in Irvine, California.
However, how did she go about transforming Miami into her drug-fueled playground for two decades without being discovered? The show’s creators attributed it to her gender.
“No one would anticipate a woman to be heading a cartel that huge, but she was a woman who could get away with a lot and disappear when she needed to. Vergara stated, “People believe that a lady could never be this evil.
However, someone was actively looking into the possibility that a woman could not be behind the drug trade, despite the male-run drug enforcement organizations’ insistence to the contrary.
As early as the mid-1970s, June Hawkins, a female intelligence analyst in the Miami police department, was determined to capture Blanco, even though she was frequently fired and primarily used to translate Spanish for her coworkers.
Hawkins was deemed a crucial component of the narrative by Newman. She is a young Latina single mother working in a society that devalued women, and she is a reflection of Griselda. She demonstrates to viewers that Griselda had other options besides what she decided to do.”
How did Griselda Blanco end up?
After being detained at her residence on February 17, 1985, Blanco was convicted of producing, bringing into the country, and selling cocaine. She was also imprisoned for twenty years after being accused with three counts of first-degree murder.
Three of her sons were murdered while she was incarcerated. She was deported to Colombia after being freed in 2004 and lived a quiet life there.
At the age of 69, she was fatally shot by a man riding a motorcycle in Medellín on September 3, 2012. The drive-by shooting was a ripoff of the assassination technique she popularized when in power.
“The extent of animosity towards her is demonstrated by her murder. Three of her four children had passed away by 2012, and she was an innocent recluse, according to Newman, who spoke to the BBC about her.
According to Baiz, the tale of the killer who wields a gun and smokes a chain is a “perfect arch”.
“She comes from nothing, experiences these incredible highs but by the time you get to the end of the story it is a tragedy that ends with total loss.”
Even though Blanco’s life was a compelling tale of power, history books frequently overlook her. Even Vergara, who grew up in Colombia during the height of the drug trade, admitted that she “had never heard of this woman” and that it seemed “impossible” that the account of her life was real.
“I wanted to play Griselda for this reason. In addition to being a mother, she is also a killer, a villain, and a lover. She demonstrates the complexity of humanity above all.”