MIAMI.- The serie of Netflix Griselda has dusted off the history of Griselda Blanco, one of the leaders of the drug trafficking most dangerous Colombian crime, which was known as The Cocaine Queen and The Black Widow, and made Miami the most violent city in the United States.
Blanco was born in Santa Marta, Colombia, but moved to Medellin with his mother Ana Lucia Restrepo in the 1950s, fleeing his father’s abuse.
With the little money they earned working as waitresses in bars, the women were able to find housing in the Antioquia neighborhood, a sector where criminals mostly resided. It was there that she met her first husband and father of her children Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo, from whom she obtained the surname Blanco that she kept until her death, the document forger Carlos Trujillo.
The man died in the seventies, but the cause of his death is uncertain: it is rumored that it was cirrhosis, while others say that Griselda ordered him to be murdered.
It was precisely the poverty in which she lived that led her to begin criminal activities, stealing wallets and taking money or valuables from drunks who came to the bars where she worked in Leuven, where she met her second husband Alberto Bravo. , and who ended up pushing her into drug trafficking.
Beginnings in drug trafficking
Bravo maintained a life of luxury by illegally importing liquor, perfumes, clothing, bags and household appliances from Panama and the United States. He sold the items to acquaintances in his social circle and rising professionals. However, he had a clandestine business that few talked about: cocaine smuggling, which he acquired through a nurse at a hospital in the area.
The drug was distributed by a German company so that the State gave it to the terminally ill to relieve pain.
It was then that Griselda, upon learning the situation, decided to make the small operation something bigger, using mules to transport the drug loads to other lands. The woman selected women and put the cocaine in their girdles and underwear, suitcases with double bottoms and shoes.
Although they arrived in Queens at the end of the 60s, some time later they settled in Miami, from where they expanded the business.
“For almost 5 years, Griselda and her husband consolidated an operation that earned them, according to authorities’ calculations, about 80 million dollars a month, which allowed them a life full of luxuries and eccentricities” Infobae.
Persecucin judicial
In 1975, Griselda was indicted by the United States on several criminal charges.
She escaped on a private plane and was received in Bogotá by a large group of bodyguards. Although her main motive was to evade North American justice, she also returned to Colombia to settle accounts with Bravo.
Blanco accused his partner of disappearing a million-dollar sum without accounting, while the man accused her of having called herself The Godmother to appear to be the head of the operation. The argument escalated and ended in a shootout that claimed the lives of seven people, including Alberto, who was shot in the face by his wife.
She was wounded, but survived and grew in cruelty.
Death de Griselda
When her name began to be in the public domain and the authorities began their search, Griselda put into practice the skills she had acquired from her first husband to falsify documents, and in this way she entered and left the United States disguised with wigs and scarves.
After a series of confrontations with other drug traffickers for control of drugs and the payment of debts, among them the well-known War of the Drug Gowboys, in addition to being wanted by justice, Griselda left the business in Miami in the hands of her children.
But they did not inherit their mother’s cunning and little by little they became evident to the authorities, without noticing that they were being pursued by agents and revealed the location of Griselda, who lived with her youngest son, Michael Corleone Seplveda, in Irvine, California.
Although Griselda posed as a Venezuelan housewife, the woman was found and detained on February 17, 1985 and sentenced months later to 15 years in prison for multiple charges of conspiracy to smuggle drugs into the United States.
“In 1993 she was accused again, this time of at least 10 homicides, including that of a 3-year-old boy who died in the middle of a confrontation over drugs. Blanco pleaded guilty only to three murders and received an additional 20 years in prison, all indicated that she would die in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, but in June 2004 she was released and returned to Medellín,” Infobae reported.
On September 3, 2012, she was murdered by a hitman while she was waiting for a delivery from the butcher shop.
