It’s the nice surprise of this month of January on Netflix. This Thursday, the streaming platform is putting six episodes of its series “Griselda” online. Directed by Eric Newman and Andrés Baiz – to whom we owe the brilliant “Narcos” – and carried by actress Sofia Vergara (“Modern Family”) in the title role, the XXS program romanticizes the life of Griselda Blanco. A dangerous drug lord, murdered in 2012, who left Medellin to settle in the United States. It was under the palm trees of Miami that she built her own empire and imposed a reign of terror in the 70s and 80s. Considered one of the pioneers of cocaine trafficking to Uncle Sam’s country, she who was nicknamed “the godmother” would also have been the mentor of a certain Pablo Escobar.
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A first murder at 11 years old
Griselda Blanco was born on February 15, 1943 in Cartagena, Colombia. Raised alone by her mother, she grew up in poverty in Medellin. At the age of 11, she organized her first kidnapping. That of a boy from a wealthy family. The latter’s parents are slow to pay the ransom. Griselda Blanco will kill him in cold blood.
At 14, she fled to escape the violence in her home. After several years of living on theft and prostitution, she married for the first time with Carlos Trujillo, a pimp – whose murder she ordered a few years later. Together, they gave birth to three children: Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo.
A woman at the head of a drug empire
In the 1960s, she married a second marriage to a drug trafficker named Alberto Bravo. They moved to New York and started their own business. To transport the goods from Colombia to the United States, Griselda Blanco has the idea of hiding them in the bra linings that she makes former prostitute colleagues wear. The network is consolidating and generating big profits. The couple very quickly found themselves at the head of a dizzying empire. But, in 1975, Griselda Blanco was indicted for cocaine trafficking. To escape justice, she fled and returned to Colombia before being arrested. There, she had her second husband killed who allegedly embezzled large sums of money – it is from this moment that the Netflix series begins.
She waited until the end of the 1970s to return to the United States. It is in Miami, Florida, that Griselda takes over the reins of her cartel, along with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda. They become the parents of a little boy, Michael Corleone, in homage to the “Godfather”. She surrounds herself with bloodthirsty hitmen and executes anyone who dares to get in her way. She would be responsible for hundreds of murders and killings (men, women and children). Her empire is flourishing and she spends her fortune on villas, jewelry and opulent parties where alcohol and drugs flow freely.
A brutal end
Eager to escape all this violence, Dario Sepulveda fled to Colombia with his son in 1983. Griselda Blanco had him shot to recover her child before leaving to live in Los Angeles, two years later, where she was arrested and then sentenced to fifteen years in prison for drug trafficking and multiple murders.
Released in 2004, she was deported from the United States to Colombia. Although she had put her affairs in order, she was murdered on September 3, 2012, shot twice in the head by two bikers, leaving a butcher’s shop. She was 69 years old.