Who was Griselda Blanco, the drug trafficker played by Sofa Vergara in her new Netflix series

Theirs is a story of blood and ashes, of lead and poverty. His life went through a certain gloom, eclipsed on many occasions by the fame that the media, also the small and big screen, gave to the one who once took shelter under its wing. A Pablo Escobar. But the streets do not forget. And neither does the cinematography. Now the challenge of Sofa Vergara It is capital: to embody the feared Black Widow, the firm Godmother of Cocaine. Relive between clapperboard and script in the singular Griselda Blanco.

I opened my eyes for the first time in 1943. The planet had to learn to live after the terror of a Second World War that had forever changed the paradigm of the main nations. The weapons stopped ringing in the Old Continent and the echoes began to be heard far away. In Colombia it began The violencetwo decades of acute internal conflict that began with the historical problem of land, concentrated in few hands and without effective agrarian reform, and ended with almosti 200,000 Colombians dead. Griselda was born into a poor family and within this tragic situation that, in some way, she never left.

From mud to Olympus sailing in blood and money

According to the voice of a former lover, his childhood knew no other version than that of fear. Not yours. Poverty made him steal wallets and become a prostitute, plunge day after day into excessive abuse of force and taste the taste of blood. On one occasion kidnapped a child and asked for a reward. Maybe it was time, which ran out without the boy’s parents raising enough money to rescue him; Maybe it was the tip to the police. Griselda was eleven years old when she decided to fire that gun.

I flew from Cartagena with just two pesos in my wallet. And he arrived in Medellin. With 21 years She already had three children, had suffered abuse from her mother’s boyfriend and married an unscrupulous criminal.. Evil tongues say that he would later have him killed. In any case, that would come later; after meeting her second husband, Alberto Bravo, he entered fully into a globe that would change his country decades later. The drug trafficking.

That life developed on two planes, in a constant flight between United States and Colombia from which he would never get off. Run the year 1976 when he founded, together with Pablo Escobar, the Ochoas, Carlos Lehder and many others, what, when the drug war broke out in Miami, was baptized by the DEA and the FBI as the Medellin poster. She didn’t know it then, or maybe she did, but had entered the history books through the back door.

She was good at being bad. No one surpassed him in taking lives and turning deaths into business. He squandered banknotes with an almost inherited ease, dressing in extravagant clothing and feeding the peculiar face that all legends need. When hitmen ambushed her husband and ended her life, everyone looked at Griselda. Other versions say that it was she who did it when she discovered that he was cheating on her.. One way or another, as if he had drunk her soul, he adopted the nickname Black Widow. And he believed it to such an extent that he made real the cultural canon that all resentful gangsters have a ruthless mother behind them: he called his last son Michael Corleone.

During this time he was as inexorable as he was untouchable. It was the opposite face of mercy. He surrounded himself with Los Pistoleros, an organized group of murderers who only accepted membership in the gang if, after killing someone, they mutilated him. The streets were filled with ownerless arms. The dead multiplied under his reign of terror, taking everything along the way, husbands included, becoming the dome something more than a triumvirate by elevating Pablo Escobar, whose potential had not gone unnoticed by her, to the top.

Enlarge

And so, between blood and mountains of money (he billed more than 80 million dollars a month), he approached immortality as he abandoned earthly things. Until he came face to face with the earth, which always claims what is its own. The police ended up catching her. The sentence, to which was added the confession of one of the Pistoleros who once defended her, amounted to 20 years. The Patron went into prison. When I came out in 2004 the world was very different. The Cartel had fallen several years ago and others were pulling the strings of drug trafficking. His empire was reduced to the memory of the streets, which always carried and will carry his name tattooed on the sidewalks.

September 3, 2012 was a normal day. Griselda was close to turning 70 years old. and was ready to buy in the carnicera Cardiso, on the corner of 30th Street in Medellin. On the list I had ossobuco and aguayn. He paid and left. When he crossed the door frame and saw the sunlight, he didn’t have time to be surprised. Two shots to the head. The perpetrator of the crime walked away. Then he took a motorcycle and disappeared.