Griselda Blanco and the female drug barons of Latin America (2024)

The new Netflix series Griselda casts light on a lesser-known figure in drug trafficking, and is part of a growing awareness of the women who run drug cartels in Latin America.

"The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco." This disquieting quote, which opens up Netflix's latest narco drama Griselda, allegedly comes from no other than the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. It encapsulates the character of the woman who was the ruthless boss of a drug empire, indelibly involved in Miami's drug wars of the 1970s and 80s. She made tens of millions of dollars per month at the peak of her drug empire, which extended to New York and California, developing a reputation as "the Godmother of Cocaine".

Blanco is said to have had a net worth of billions before her arrest in February 1985 for manufacturing, importing and distributing cocaine to the US (she was released in 2004 and died in Colombia in 2012). Her story is the subject of the new six-part crime drama starring Sofía Vergara and created by Narcos and Narcos: Mexico showrunner Eric Newman and Narcos director Andrés Baiz.

Previously a lesser-known figure in mainstream culture, Blanco is now the focus of wider attention due to the rise of interest in drug lords including Escobar, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. The 2006 documentary film Cocaine Cowboys and its sequel, Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin' with the Godmother (2008), first introduced Blanco to English-speaking audiences. Since then, she's been featured in several documentaries, films and songs.

Griselda's timelinebegins with Blanco and her sons fleeing Colombia in 1964 with no money and a kilo of cocaine hidden in one of their suitcases, and takes in her rise as a feared Queenpin. "She's largely credited with having been one of the main people to bring cocaine to Miami in the 70s and 80s. She recognised the market, saw a business opportunity and exploited it to the max," Deborah Bonello, the author of Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's Cartels, tells BBC Culture.

Blanco subverted social expectations by using women as drug mules, exploiting the fact that they appeared less suspicious to law enforcement. In the series, cocaine is sewn into bras worn by her drug mules, who smuggled it into the US undetected.

The show follows a similar format to the series Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, with flashbacks that focus on Blanco's psyche, offering an insight into the woman behind the powerful drug empire. We see Blanco hustling her way up, her success and subsequent fall.

Vergara's role in Griselda is a departure from her more comedic ones like that in Modern Family. Here, she plays a chain-smoking, powerful woman who is not only smart, tough, intimidating and cold but who also displays vulnerability.

Also born in Colombia, the actor spent a long time preparing for the role and making sure her performance was authentic to the story. "Getting the look correct was very important to me because I needed to disappear. I wanted no one to think of me or my last role as [her Modern Family character] Gloria Pritchett. I wanted to get inside Griselda's head and really understand her mentality, where she was coming from," says Vergara in the production notes.

The series reveals the ruthlessness of the woman who was known as "the Black Widow" because of her alleged involvement in her three husbands' deaths.It also shows someone who was a devoted mother, resorting to crime and justifying her actions as a way of caring for her sons. According to Vergara, "In the world she came from, she did what she knew how to do. But the truth is, only the real Griselda could tell you why she did all that she did."

As a woman in a dangerous, male-dominated environment, Blanco defied stereotypes and social norms. She embraced her criminal persona, naming her youngest son Michael Corleone after the crime boss in the Godfather films. After an abusive, impoverished childhood, Blanco seemed to think that in order to survive a toxic, macho world, she had to be twice as harsh and tough as a man.

The women behind the drug empires

But Blanco wasn't alone– there are other women who took on high-ranking roles within drug cartels, even becoming bosses. Women such as Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, to date the highest-ranking woman in the Sinaloa Cartel to emerge into the public eye, who ran logistics and was a money launderer for El Chapo, and Marllory Chacon Rossell, a Guatemalan known as "Queen of the South" who ran one of the largest money laundering and drug trafficking organisations in Central America.

"Marllory is super interesting because she was educated," says Bonello. "She was beautiful, which in some ways fitted into that stereotype, but she was virtually unknown. And yet, at one point, the US Treasury Department said that she was one of the most prolific traffickers in Central America. How can that be? How is she so powerful and not known?"

This question made Bonello think about how power in terms of organised crime is defined through the veil of violence, and who is the most violent person in the room. "The way that many women wield power – not that they aren't capable of violence – manifests in different ways." In Griselda, this is shown in the way Blanco cleverly uses her power and charms to orchestrate violent acts executed by her many hitmen.

Bonello has spent the last 15 years living and working in Mexico reporting on organised crime and the narcotics underworld. It became obvious to her from early on how all the narratives centred around men and the few women mentioned in the news like Emma Coronel, El Chapo's wife, had ceremonial positions: the attractive wives of mob bosses.

She started researching the few women whose names came up in the court trials of drug lords, which opened a world of unreported information she used in Narcas. "There was so much information in plain sight that no one was really interested in. And the more cases I looked for, the more cases I found. I relied on PACER [Public Access to Court Electronic Records] to access indictments, transcripts and plea deals for research. And also spoke to legal lawyers, immigration lawyers, and people who knew the women, reaching out to the women and going to their places of operation."

A delicate balance

Griselda's makers are similarly bringing to light an underreported aspect of drug trafficking. While portraying Blanco as a nuanced character, theysay they have been careful not to create a narrative that would glamorise Blanco and the world in which she operated. "The series is about the horrible lengths that this particular person took to provide for her family. We were honest about her impact and the terrible things that happened as a result of her actions. Omitting them would have done a disservice to the story of the victims," says Vergara, who is also an executive producer of the series.

She claims that the show does not excuse the choices Blanco made but highlights the drug empire's effect on Miami society as a whole. Without intending to glorify her, the show's creators aimed to unearth the complex story of the woman who managed to create a multi-billion-dollar empire in a "country that was not her own, through tactics that she devised that were both ingenious and cruel".

Although Blanco is shown leading a lavish lifestyle, the series focuses on the brutality of the narcotics underworld. It's a story about the dangers of greed, power and operating in abject criminality. In the end, there are no winners. As with others in the Narcos universe and beyond, Blanco's life is a parable of what happens to most people who get involved in the drug trade, with either long prison sentences or violent deaths.

Blanco employed hitmen known as Pistoleros to carry out motorbike ride assassinations in the US, gunning down enemies point blank. In an ironic twist of fate, this method is how Blanco's life ended at the age of 69 outside a butcher shop in Medellín in September 2012 (she was deported back to Colombia in 2004 after having served almost 20 years in prison).

Despite the programme-makers' intentions, however, there's always the risk that narco-culture TV shows and films still glamorise the lifestyle, especially for audiences who might not have been affected by the war on drugs. There have been questions over how Pablo Escobar was portrayed as an antihero in Narcos. People rooted for him, but Colombians remembered how he terrorised their streets.

According to Bonello, "Most Latin Americans have either been directly affected by organised crime or know someone who's been affected by it. It is and remains the biggest threat to public security in Latin America. It's much more personal for many people who live South of the US/Mexico border. The challenge is to try and create content that doesn't glorify things."

Griselda premieres on Netflix on 25 January.

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