"The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco." This statement attributed to Pablo Escobar serves as a calling card for the figure of the drug trafficker Griselda Blanco. A ruthless criminal who led a life of luxury and excess, but also of crimes and long stays in prison. This Thursday the new Netflix fiction about her life starring Sofía Vergara premieres.
The drug trafficker's death was just as atypical as her career. On September 3, 2012, Blanco was shot to death at the age of 69 when she went to buy osso buco at the Cardiso butcher shop, near her house in a neighborhood of Medellín, and a motorist shot her two bullets in the head. It was the method with which she herself had several hundred people killed during her life, it is said, without any mercy.
Known as the black widow or the godmother of cocaine, Blanco was one of the first drug traffickers in recorded history. Her most popular alias, black widow, is due to the theory that it was she herself who murdered several of her husbands, although she always denied it. The only survivor of her three husbands was her first, José Trujillo, alias El Pestañitas, whom she Blanco threatened with death and decided to flee.
At the age of 21, she married a second time a Colombian trafficker named Alberto Bravo, with whom she settled in Queens, New York, and laid the foundations of the cocaine empire that she later came to command. Whether it was because the man was unfaithful to her or because the business's million-dollar accounts did not add up is not clear, but the point is that she shot him four accurate shots in the head. She left the three children she had with him fatherless, whom they named Uber, Osvaldo and Dixon.
Her third husband was Darío Sepúlveda. With this man she had a son whom they named Michael Corleone Sepúlveda Blanco, in honor of the character from The Godfather. After a series of conflicts in the United States, Sepúlveda decided to take Michael Corleone to Medellín to keep him away from the dangerous environment of his mother, who by then was already the American drug lady. She died from numerous gunshot wounds in the back in Medellín.
With an estimated net worth of around $500 million at the time, it was between the late seventies and early eighties when Blanco moved from New York to Miami. There he began to live a life of luxury and participated in the bloody drug war of the eighties, known as the Cocaine Cowboys Wars, which made the city one of the most dangerous in the world. She was charged with the deaths of Cuban drug traffickers Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo and the minor Johnny Castro, and finally entered prison in 1994 after many years of eluding her.
But he was spared a life sentence. Blanco was released on June 6, 2004, after spending twenty years in prison. She returned to her native Colombia, where she lived a few years of relative tranquility until poetic justice finished her off. Blanco introduced the innovation of motorcycle shooting because of the ease of escaping the scene. And so they murdered her.
