Notorious Medellín 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. 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 Medellín 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 a technique — the motorcycle drive-by hit — that Blanco is said to have invented.
Throughout her life, the 5-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, and 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 Medellín.
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."
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 own line
of lingerie with hidden compartments that made it easier for women to transport drugs.
La Madrina, as she was called, even owned her own lingerie shop!
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.”
Blanco's unwavering ruthlessness was well-known. She was a suspect in the
killing of one of her former associates' 2-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 Jesús Castro, the father, was gonna 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. Her only living son, Michael, survived seven assassination attempts.
In 2004, 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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