Her cruelty and her hatred and her unbridled rage brought Griselda Blanco from the bottom to the top of the world. The “Reina de la Cocaina” was considered the most powerful and richest woman of her era, and her life story was filmed several times. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jennifer Lopez played the godmother from Colombia. Now also Sofía Vergara in a Netflix production. But the series doesn’t do justice to the furor that accompanied Griselda through her life. Her biography simply couldn’t be made into a film one-to-one.
Griselda Blanco was born in a suburb of Medellin in 1943. Persecuted by her violent mother’s men, she spent her childhood on the streets. Her first known act was already a foreshadowing of what was to come: Griselda and her gang kidnapped an eleven-year-old child in order to extort ransom money. When the parents didn’t want to pay, Griselda quickly killed the boy with a shot between the eyes.
So they had a name, even as a quinceañera she was a fearsome woman. The most violent men desired her. Griselda Blanco led the wild life of a lawless and precocious pin-up girl. However, her nickname later became “Potato”. She was small and got really fat as she got older. A round head towered on the thick neck. But her appetite for men was almost as great as her penchant for violence.
She emigrated to the USA with her first husband, where she rose to the highest heights of the drug trade. “El Tiempo” wrote that Pablo Escobar was an apprentice to her and later fought against his godmother. In the USA, more than 200 people are said to have been killed, countless of whom were killed by the “Reina de la Cocaina” herself. The Blanco also went down in the history of global crime. Their innovation: execution from a motorcycle. Their gang was called the “Cocaine Cowboys.” The style of killing is still as popular today as the execution by car bomb, which the mafia had developed ten years earlier. Her own death was a nod to her favorite method of murder: As an old woman, Blanco was struck down by two motorcycle killers in 2012.
At the same time, Blanco had the idea of using poor young women from the street as drug runners. Blanco began designing custom bras and belts with hidden pockets for the cocaine. In Medellín, she founded a lingerie store that custom-made drug smuggling underwear. In a corset and bra, a girl could carry around four kilograms. At times, Blanco was considered the richest and most powerful woman in the world.
Her three men paid for their love for Blanco with their lives. The death of husband number 2, Alberto Bravo, was particularly well known. The couple met in a parking lot. Blanco had discovered that her lover was working with Pablo Escobar against her and he had also siphoned off millions of dollars from their joint business. When Alberto made fun of her title “The Godmother”, Griselda Blanco became very angry. She is said to have pulled a pistol out of her boot. Bravo was able to reach for his Uzi, but by then Blanco had already put a bullet through his head. Seriously injured herself, she escaped in her car. Six bodyguards were left dead in the parking lot. After her fighters later told her about her husband’s death, the godmother is said to have smiled blissfully. She didn’t shy away from children either. When Griselda Blanco wanted to eliminate the killer Jesús Castro in 1982, her men did not find Castro. In order to have something to show to the boss, they quickly shot his two-year-old son. Blanco was delighted to have humiliated Jesús Castro.
The couple named the son she had with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, Michael Corleone Blanco. A tribute to Al Pacino’s role in The Godfather films. The handsome Dario Sepulveda is said to have been the love of the “Black Widow” – another of Blanco’s nicknames. But at the age of five, the child Michael Corleone witnessed his father being shot by his mother’s killers. Sepulveda had previously fallen out with Griselda and kidnapped the boy to Colombia. Although he was a murderer himself, he is said to have been unable to tolerate the fact that the child was living with the increasingly paranoid mother. During this time, Griselda Blanco is said to have smoked a cocaine mixture called “Bazooka” continuously. The stuff is said to have made her even wilder and more suspicious than she already was by nature. Instead of going to court to fight for custody, Blanco preferred the quick solution. After his father’s death, the boy came back to her.
The DEA arrested Griselda Blanco in 1984 as she read the Bible on her bed. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and deported to Colombia in 2004. There she lived in seclusion from her remaining assets. Until someone wanted to settle an outstanding score eight years later. Of her children, only Michael Corleone survived her. “A lot of people say Blanco had to be so violent because she wanted to assert herself as a woman in a man’s world, but I don’t believe that,” Al Singleton, a retired Miami police officer who investigated the drug kingpin, said in a documentary. “I know from people close to her that this cruelty was Griselda Blanco’s true nature.”
Background:
Documentary: “Cocaine Cowboys – The True Story Behind Scarface and Miami Vice”
Griselda Blanco: The Cocaine Queen, Henri Dauber
