Notorious Medellin Cartel drug lord Griselda Blanco shaped her legacy with the vicious approach she exerted over the cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s. Although she was too cunning to pull the trigger on enemies herself, Blanco had no qualms about ordering the death of anyone who stood in the way of her wealth and power.
Griselda Blanco’s Murder
The Miami Herald noted that, in the end, she met the same fate as many she had called for herself—gunned down by a hired assassin at the behest of a rival. Colombian media claimed that two motorcycle-riding hitmen located Blanco while she was leaving a butcher shop in the Medellin neighborhood of Belen, with her pregnant daughter-in-law. Although her relative was unharmed, CNN reported that one of the hitmen shot Blanco twice in the head at close range. The infamous Black Widow was allegedly dead by the time law enforcement arrived at the scene.
The assassination utilized the technique Blanco was said to have invented—the motorcycle drive-by hit. Throughout her life, the five-foot-tall Cartagena-born mother of four enjoyed a brutal reputation that belied her seeming frailty. While it can be difficult to muster much sympathy for a figure as callous as Blanco, it’s depressingly easy to see that she was very much a product of the culture that shaped her.
From Childhood Adversity to Criminal Infamy
In a childhood like something out of Charles Dickens, if the world Dickens created had somehow been much worse, according to The Sun, Blanco was born to an alcoholic, abusive mother. Coming of age during the country’s horrific civil war, Blanco earned money by digging graves. Her crimes really escalated at age 11 when she allegedly participated in kidnapping a young boy for ransom. When the child’s family couldn’t pay, it was Blanco who pulled the trigger.
As a teenager, the streets of Cartagena could no longer contain Blanco, so she left for Medellin. The cunning and resourcefulness she developed during her early desperate years probably helped her become one of the world’s wealthiest women. As her son Michael Corleone Blanco told The Mirror, “My mother was no saint; she had to survive to do her thing.”
Innovations in Crime
Blanco’s ingenuity meant she was often an unlikely innovator in a field dominated by men. According to Don Diva Magazine, Blanco was raking in $8 million monthly at the height of her power, partially thanks to her inventiveness. Reportedly, she developed her line of lingerie with hidden compartments that made it easier for women to transport drugs. La Madrina, as she was called, even owned her lingerie shop.
The Godmother’s American Dream
Once Blanco moved to the United States, she quickly established her own network for dealing cocaine. She sold to celebrities, famous athletes, and other people of prominence. She also had the good fortune or foresight to move to Miami at the precise moment when the city’s cocaine boom was beginning.
Known as the Godmother of Cocaine, Blanco was a fixture of the so-called Cocaine Cowboys era that saw the drug proliferate in Miami, with its proceeds funding the city’s real estate boom in the 1970s and 80s. According to The Guardian, she was widowed three times and believed to be responsible for anywhere from 40 to 200 deaths. The fact that the homicide rate dropped dramatically after she was arrested attested to Blanco’s unwavering ruthlessness.
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Blanco’s Personal Life
She was a suspect in the killing of one of her former associates’ two-year-old son. While his father was the target, Blanco was allegedly happy with the child’s death—he somehow offended her son Osvaldo, and she determined that Jesus Castro, the father, was going to be killed. For as much misery as Blanco heaped onto other families, hers also suffered from her prominence. According to The Mirror, three of her four sons were murdered, and her only living son Michael survived seven assassination attempts in 2004.
Transformation
Following an imprisonment in the States, Blanco was released and deported back to Colombia. According to Blanco’s pregnant daughter-in-law at the time she was killed, she was trying to leave her past life behind and succeed in the field of real estate. But Bruce Bagley, author and head of the University of Miami’s Department of International Studies, believes that this perception of the heartless killer is dangerous. He told The Guardian, “The danger is she will be remembered not for her cold-heartedness and brutality but for being a woman entrepreneur in an emerging field dominated by men.
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