History & Culture
How did a girl who grew up in poverty in Colombia become an international narcotics queenpin pushing $80 a million a month in cocaine?
ByParissa DJangi
Published February 2, 2024
The Godmother. The Black Widow. Queenpin. Griselda Blanco’s many aliases and nicknames speak to the notoriety she gained by heading a billion-dollar, blood-soaked drug empire that stretched from Colombia to the United States.
Now the subject of the Netflix series Griselda, Blanco’s life blurred the line between fact and fiction as she clawed her way to a position of power in a violent world. So, who was the real woman behind the myth?
Griselda Blanco’s rise
Blanco was born in Colombia on February 15, 1943. Her homeland would soon be torn apart by La Violencia, a period of mass violence and unrest which began on April 9, 1948, when popular politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated on the streets of Bogotá. By the time La Violencia ended a decade later, 200,000 people had been killed.
Blanco came of age against this backdrop of violence. As historian Elaine Carey pointed out in Women Drug Traffickers, Blanco and her contemporaries learned that “power frequently came through violent acts.”
Growing up in poverty in Medellín, Blanco initially didn’t have much power. She cut her teeth in the criminal world at the age of 11, when she allegedly kidnapped a local boy and murdered him after her ransom attempt didn’t pan out. In the coming years, she added pickpocketing and counterfeiting money to her resume.
Blanco met and eventually married Carlos Trujillo, who made a living falsifying papers and trafficking humans. The marriage produced three children but ended in divorce. And by the mid-1970s, Trujillo was dead. Some say Trujillo died from health issues; others claim Blanco was really behind his death.
Making white gold a family business
The disco boom of the 1970s sparked a growing market for illicit drugs like cocaine. By the middle of the decade, Colombia had emerged as the center of the cocaine trade, which brought opportunities for staggering wealth––and danger.
Together with Alberto Bravo, a drug smuggler and Blanco’s second husband, they built a cocaine empire based in New York. They relied on smugglers who wore specially designed undergarments to conceal drugs across international borders.
As the empire grew, Blanco’s relationship with Bravo deteriorated. Though the specifics of what exactly happened remain disputed, Bravo was killed in 1975. Blanco later claimed that she personally shot him in the mouth.
Bravo’s death cemented the image of Griselda Blanco as the “Black Widow,” a woman who got rid of her husbands by killing them.
At its peak, Blanco’s network pushed $80 million worth of cocaine every month. Her biggest markets included New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.
Blanco’s cocaine empire earned her the nickname “The Godmother,” Colombia’s answer to The Godfather’s Vito Corleone. Blanco seemed to lean into the mythology. After she gave birth to her fourth and final child in 1978, she named him Michael Corleone in honor of the film’s central character.
Blanco’s reign of terror in Miami
Violence was the foundation upon which Blanco built and maintained her empire. It was the oil that kept the engine of her network running––and it transformed Miami into a battlefield in the drug wars.
One of the most public attacks happened on July 11, 1979. Two men, likely at Blanco’s bidding, gunned down a cocaine dealer and his bodyguard in a liquor store at Miami’s Dadeland Mall.
In another Miami incident, Blanco ordered the murder of her associate Jesus Castro, who had reportedly kicked one of her children. But when her hitmen attempted to do the job in 1982, they mistakenly killed Castro’s two-year-old son Johnny instead.
According to Jorge Ayala, one of her assassins, Blanco welcomed the error. “At first she was real mad ‘cause we missed the father. But when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even.”
Blanco’s children witnessed violence firsthand. In 1983, she probably ordered the death of her third husband, Dario Sepúlveda. He was killed in front of Michael Corleone, their five-year-old son, in Colombia.
In total, officials suspected Blanco’s involvement in no less than 40 murders across the U.S.
Blanco’s fall
Blanco managed to stay one step ahead of the law—for a while, at least. The United States Drug Enforcement Administration worked with informants to track her down and build a case against her.
Officials arrested her in Irvine, California, on February 17, 1985, and the resulting trial sentenced her to 15 years in prison. Nine years later, more charges came, this time for the murders of Johnny Castro and drug dealers Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo.
Blanco was deported to Colombia in 2004, and lived quietly in El Poblado, Medellín’s wealthiest neighborhood for eight years.
On September 3, 2012, 69-year-old Griselda Blanco stepped outside a butcher’s shop in Medellín. Suddenly, two shots rang out––they had come from the gun of assassins on a motorcycle, which quickly fled the scene. Blanco collapsed. The woman who had forged a bloody path away from the poverty of Medellín’s streets ultimately died on them.
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