Perhaps you’ve seen the promo. It looks like Sofia Vergara, but the nose looks weird and she’s definitely not smiling. You’re not the only one who’s noticed. Vergara recently starred in the Narcos-esque Netflix show Griselda, with prosthetics on her face. Griselda is of course one of the most notorious narco traffickers of all time. So how much of it is true?
For starters, as much as filmmakers tried to downplay Vergara’s looks in the movie, she still looks nothing like the real Griselda Blanco, who was shorter, more rotund and a lot more plain looking. There was also the fact that Griselda could change her appearance at will, something she was so good at she earned the moniker the chameleon.
If you believe the legends, she was a goddess of war and drugs – A female Caligula of sorts who hosted drug-fueled orgies and was known for her ruthless murderousness, something that won her nicknames like The Black Widow, La Madrina, La Gordita, La Dona Gris and La Gorda.
Griselda was born in 1943 to an alcoholic mother in Cartagena, Columbia. Her life of crime started early and viciously. When she was 11, she reportedly kidnapped a rich boy in town and demanded ransom, and when the parents didn’t listen she killed the boy. At 11! By 12 she was a prostitute on the streets, and by 13 she moved to New York. By the time she started moving cocaine to the United States she already shot her first husband, a pimp named Carlos Trujillo.
The combination of Griselda’s intelligence and ruthlessness made her one of the most effective crime lords ever. One of her husbands owned a clothing company, so she had special pockets sewn in them to help smuggle drugs. At her peak, Griselda was earning millions of dollars a month, with an estimated haul of $1.5 billion throughout her tenure at the top. She didn’t mind killing and at one point she had eight strippers murdered because she thought they were sleeping with her then-husband.
At one point during her reign, there was so much killing in Miami that the morgue had to borrow a Burger King truck to keep all the bodies refrigerated. She was finally caught in 1985 and during a 15-year prison term she was charged with three murders, and she was only charged because she took a plea deal. She was released in 2004 to Colombia and was gunned down in 2012. Ironically, she was killed by an assassin on a motorcycle, a method she was thought to have favored herself. So, how much of this was true and how much was embellished in the show? Let’s find out.
How much of Griselda is true?
To be clear, we are talking about the show here and its veracity. The show is a six-part miniseries that fictionalizes Griselda’s story and highlights some of the more outrageous claims in her biography. It’s produced by the people behind Narcos, so it has a similar gritty feel to it.
Series creator Eric Newman maintains that authenticity was the most important part of capturing Griselda’s story. “There’s no interview you’re going to get with Griselda Blanco that tells you what she was thinking and feeling,” he said. “And so creating that in the most authentic way becomes essential.”
Of course, there were some liberties taken, the most obvious being the choice of actress. There are many other differences as well. In the show, Griselda runs to Miami after she murders her second husband Alberto Bravo. In reality, she had already been working in the States for years. However, the bra thing is true. According to Noiser:
“They were also creating garments that would facilitate this, such as specialised brassieres and girdles and things like that… where they could actually enhance the female figure… These garments would allow for the drugs to be more smoothed around the body and it would just look like a woman’s natural figure.”
The genius of that is how the drugs were stashed right in the places guards naturally looked, therefore pretty much hiding them in plain sight. One thing the show got right was the murders. For example, she was responsible for the Dadeland Mall Massacre of 1979. It was especially gruesome, and news reports at the time stated that one man was shot so many times he “looked like Swiss cheese.”
She was also responsible for the murder of a 2-year-old boy who was the son of Jesús “Chucho” Castro, one of her former enforcers who had a beef with her son. While she wasn’t present for the killing, the Tampa Bay Times reported that she put out the hit. One thing the show did, probably to humanize Griselda and make her a more sympathetic character, was to make her feel guilty and weirded out about murder, and having her only employ it when she was forced to prove her mettle.
In reality, she loved violence and murder. One of her enforcers, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, said she would kill you the same way she would slap a mosquito on her arm. If you got drugs from her and didn’t pay, she would kill you. If she bought drugs and didn’t feel like paying, she would kill you. When she would order a hit, she would instruct her enforcers to kill everyone around so there were no witnesses, including women and children.
Also in the show, Griselda escapes to California after the death of a rival’s girlfriend, who dies while the two are high on cocaine. She calls the authorities in fear because she doesn’t want the drug lord coming after her. This isn’t what happened. She simply had too many enemies and by the time authorities caught up with her in Irvine, California, she was at home reading the bible.
One thing that’s true in the series is the murder case falling apart after the state’s attorneys were caught having an inappropriate relationship with a star witness. When she eventually left prison and returned to her homeland, she lived in a gated community but was murdered at a butcher shop. Unfortunately, all of her sons were murdered, just like in the show. She does have one remaining son, named Michael Corleone Blanco. He is reportedly upset with the depiction of his mother in the show.