‘Griselda’: what is fact or fiction in the Netflix series about the ‘godmother of cocaine’

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How much of the image of a ruthless woman who murdered her husbands and feared by Pablo Escobar is real? To answer the question, we spoke to Colombian journalist José Guarnizo, who has been investigating the story of Griselda Blanco for 12 years and is about to publish a second book about her by Planeta. Sofia Vergara plays Griselda Blanco in the Netflix series that premiered in January Disclosure/Netflix A week after its premiere, “Griselda” is the most watched series on Netflix United States and “Griselda Blanco”, the main character, is one of the most searched for names on Google. The six-chapter series starring Sofia Vergara, one of the most famous Latina actresses in Hollywood, tells part of the story of the Colombian drug dealer who came to command the drug empire in Miami during the 80s. But as with other audiovisual productions that portray the Colombian drug wars, “Griselda” is a “fictional drama based on real events”, and it is not so easy to identify what is fact and what is fiction as the plot develops. The series shows a mother of four who built her own army, faced the bosses of Medellín, hired prostitutes to serve as mules and ordered the murders of men, women and even children to defend her territory. But how much of the image of the ruthless woman who murdered her husbands and feared by Pablo Escobar is real? To answer the question, we spoke to Colombian journalist José Guarnizo, who has been investigating the story of Griselda Blanco for 12 years and is about to publish a second book about her by Planeta. Guarnizo shared with BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish-language service, the manuscript of the 150-page book, which bears the same name as the Netflix series and which allows us to analyze to what extent the fiction of “Griselda” resembles the reality of White. Warning: This text contains spoilers for the Netflix series “Griselda”. Husbands and the myth of the black widow In the series, Griselda has two husbands, but in reality she had three. Everyone is dead. The first was José Darío Trujillo, known as Pestañas. They married when she was 14 and had three children. It was with him that Griselda started in the drug business and, according to some testimonies, this was the most important marriage for her. Regarding Trujillo’s death, however, there are different versions. “In several books they say that she had him killed, but that’s not true. I was able to confirm that he died in New York, that he had cirrhosis and that they had to repatriate the body”, explains Guarnizo. The second husband was Alberto Bravo, who appears briefly in the series under his real name. With him, Griselda set up an exchange office in Medellín, consolidated the shipment of drugs to New York and together they managed to leave Barrio Antioquia, the popular and marginal area in which Griselda grew up, to an upper middle class neighborhood. Bravo was the stepfather of her first three children, who began studying at a private school and having greater comfort in the 1970s. In fiction, Griselda herself kills Bravo for forcing her to have sex with his brother to pay off a debt , but in reality there is no evidence that this actually happened. “There are many testimonies and documents that indicate that Alberto Bravo was killed in Bogotá and by a wing of the Medellín cartel that included several of the drug traffickers that appear in the series,” says Guarnizo. Some time later and now living in Miami, Griselda meets her third husband, Darío Sepúlveda, a central character in the series. It was with him that she had her fourth child, Michael Corleone Sepúlveda Bravo, named after the fictional character in the novel “The Godfather”, written by Mario Puzo and brought to the cinema by Francis Ford Coppola. Apparently, Sepúlveda died murdered for personal reasons, as the fiction recreates. “There are several indications that Griselda had something to do with Sepúlveda’s murder because he took their son to Colombia. She even, in an interview with an American producer, which I transcribe in the book, accepts that he took the boy “. In the end, it is likely that Griselda killed one of her three husbands, but not all of them as was believed, thanks to a mythical construction of the character, which earned her the nickname black widow. The surviving children of a dramatic capture Michael Corleone, Griselda’s youngest son, with his mother Reproduction Griselda’s children are secondary characters in the series and appear with their real names. Uber, Dixon and Oswaldo (Ozzie in the series) are the children she had with her first husband, and the youngest, Michael Corleone, with her last. One of the most dramatic moments in the series is when she flees with her four children to California, after the war with the Medellín cartel forced her to leave Miami. What actually happened. What didn’t happen was that she handed herself over to the authorities as a strategy to escape her enemies. “I interviewed Palomo, the DEA agent who was behind Griselda’s capture. He confirmed that he found the city where she was hiding in California and that he followed the tracks of luxury cars because he knew her children were car enthusiasts. “, recalls the journalist. And the arrest seems to have been more cinematic in real life than in the series: “The DEA agent had promised to kiss her if he managed to capture her and that’s what he did when he found her reading the Bible.” In fiction, the prison is led by the character of June Hawkins, a Miami police detective who suffers discrimination from her male colleagues. Hawkins is a real character who helped arrest Griselda. In a 2017 episode of the Law Enforcement Talk podcast, Hawkins herself spoke about her career in a male universe and the pursuit of the cocaine godmother. It is also known that Hawkins met the actress who plays her in the series. But what happened to Griselda’s children when she was arrested? In fiction, the three oldest die before her, but in reality there is evidence that Dixon survived. “Uber is murdered in Medellín in a drug deal and Oswaldo has his death ordered by Pablo Escobar, from La Catedral prison. The middle one, Dixon, survived and even lived with Griselda when she returned to Colombia, but was addicted to several drugs and had a very dependent life,” says Guarnizo. And, finally, Michael Corleone is Griselda’s best-known son. It is known that he is now 43 years old and that he recently sued Netflix and Sofia Vergara, who is also an executive producer of the series, for telling her mother’s story without offering financial compensation or participation. Sofia Vergara with the actors who play Griselda’s children in the Netflix series Getty Images Griselda’s associates and enemies “The only man I’ve ever been afraid of is a woman called Griselda Blanco, Pablo Escobar”, with this sentence begins the first chapter of the series. It is not easy to verify whether Escobar actually thought or said something like that, or whether he is part of the myths that were created around the narco universe that continues to conquer screens around the world. What is known is that Griselda and Escobar met, but, contrary to what was said about a supposed friendship between them, they were enemies. “I interviewed Popeye, the famous assassin who survived Escobar, because no one had asked him about Griselda. He remembered in the midst of his sociopathy some concrete details, like that Pablo Escobar was proud that his first great enemy in the world of mafia would have been her”, observes Guarnizo. “This happened when Escobar was trying to get his first kilo of coke to sell and Griselda was already in business and had money.” This tension between them led to the first war in Medellín in the late 70s and ended up taking Griselda out of Colombia, which is when she will try her luck in Miami. Already in the new city, Griselda had to face a very influential family known as the Ochoa brothers, who were part of the Medellín cartel, led by Fabio Ochoa and who had a lot of power in the world of the mafia. “There was a double war between the Ochoas and Griselda, with a lot of tension, until they ended up becoming partners. Furthermore, she began to have a friendly relationship with Marta Ochoa Saldarriaga, as shown in the series”, he adds. Marta was a cousin of the Ochoas, lent merchandise to Griselda and ended up murdered by her. “Marta’s body, tortured and abandoned in a plumbing in Miami, marked a break in Griselda’s evolution in the business. At that point (February, March and April 1984), Chefona no longer had partners, either because she owed them money , either because she had ordered them to be killed, or because they didn’t trust her”, writes Guarnizo in his text. As for the characters of Rafael and Papo, they both actually existed and these are their real names. Rafael Salazar, better known as Rafico, was a famous drug lord from Medellín. As for Papo Mejía, Guarnizo confirms that the scene in which he is attacked by a Cuban sent by Griselda at an airport did indeed happen. Mejía survived and began to cooperate with justice. The killers and the prostitutes, her allies In the series, Griselda positions herself in Miami thanks to her killers and a network of female prostitutes that she knew from Medellín and that she trains to travel periodically with the drug hidden in their clothes. But did she belong to the world of prostitution? “I don’t think so. There are many testimonies from Barrio Antioquia that indicate that her mother went. Barrio Antioquia was formed, let’s say, as the tolerance zone of Medellín by a decree and then all the brothels began to appear”, explains the journalist. “Griselda’s parents lived there and she grew up in that cabaret environment. Some statements say that she even danced there to earn some marks.” This would explain Blanco’s relationship with women who practiced prostitution and who carried drugs in their wigs, shoes and clothes. The strategy worked because at that time there were no x-rays at airports. Over time, however, traffickers had to find new ways to get around the controls. As for the killers, the series develops two key characters who were actually part of Griselda’s life: Chucho and Rivi. The story of Chucho Castro is the most dramatic. Griselda met him in Medellín when they were young and not casually in a cafe in Miami, as shown in the series, says Guarnizo. What is true is that Griselda is responsible for the death of Jonny, Chucho’s 3-year-old son. This was confirmed by Chucho a Guarnizo himself. “He told me that they shot Rivi from a car. They chase him and kill the child. What is not in the series is that Chucho puts his son’s corpse in a bathtub with ice, spends the whole night crying with his wife and ends up delivering the boy to the mosque”. Chucho survived, almost miraculously, and lived for many years until he died of Covid in 2019; His wife, Janeth, is alive. As for Jorge Rivera, Rivi, is a character who was actually involved in many of the events that the series recreates. For Guarnizo, Rivi “is Griselda’s great killer in Miami, even the actor in the series looks like the real Rivi. He was more robust, but the face is very similar”. A real ending less decent than in fiction Griselda’s decline occurs when she goes to prison. In fiction, they show the investigators’ frustration when they see that they can only accuse Griselda of drug trafficking and not for all the homicides that were supposedly her responsibility. They were able to link her to three homicides, the most documented being the 3-year-old boy, although in reality, says Guarnizo, “Griselda was involved in about 100 homicides that occurred in Miami in the early 1980s, a sign of the war that was unleashed. That was the thesis of the DEA and the Public Prosecutor’s Office.” The main witness in the case against Griselda was Rivi who, as the series shows, ends up involved in a scandal due to some sexual calls with an employee, which ended up affecting the authorities’ plan. Griselda was not sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty, but she spent 19 years in prison in the United States and not seven or 13, as the series indicates. After serving her sentence, Griselda returned to Medellín, where she lived until she was murdered in 2012, at the age of 69. “Griselda was the only drug dealer at that time who became old while being free”, an achievement in the world of the mafia, observes Guarnizo.

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