Released on Netflix on January 25, the miniseries “Griselda” is a story based on real events about drug trafficker Griselda Blanco. Played by Sofía Vergara (“Modern Family”), the production seeks to portray the trajectory of crimes of the woman who became known as the 'cocaine queen', as well as her story.
After the miniseries, doubts remained about the members of Griselda Blanco's family.
What was Griselda Blanco's family like?
Family was important to Griselda Blanco. Her own, by blood, and the one she created with cocaine, where she set up an illegal trafficking empire from Colombia to the United States.
“She loved the power that being the matriarch of a cocaine 'family' gave her and modeled her organization after the mafia family portrayed in the film 'The Godfather'”, according to a report from the United States Department of Justice. In fact, he even named the son he had with his henchman, Darío Sepúlveda, “Michael Corleone”.
But the boundaries between the two families – the biological and the cocaine family – were porous. In 1984, some young Colombians in Miami boasted to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informants that they distributed large quantities of cocaine. “Three of them were Griselda Blanco’s children”, according to the same source. Thus, there was no family without a company, nor a company without a family.
Griselda, “the black widow”
Griselda Blanco also went down in history as “the black widow”, in reference to the death of her husbands, according to the InsightCrime.
The first of them was Carlos Trujillo, a forger of documents related to human trafficking, whom Griselda married when she was just 13 years old, according to an investigation in the book “Cocaine Cowgirl”, by journalist Jennie Erin Smith.
After the couple moved to New York and had their first three children together, Trujillo reportedly died of cirrhosis, although in the book “Drugs in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law”, by Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver, the death was attributed to the companion.
When Trujillo died in the mid-1970s, Blanco was already involved in drug trafficking thanks to contact with Alberto Bravo, a smuggler who was her lover and who would soon become her second husband, according to “Cocaine Cowgirl”.
After building an extensive and highly profitable business in the US, Blanco was convinced that her husband was stealing from her. That year, a shooting ended Bravo's life, although the InsightCrime attribute his death to Blanco, who continued the business on his own.
After Bravo's death, Blanco married a third time to Darío Sepúlveda, with whom she had her fourth son, Michael Corleone. According to the same document from the Department of Justice, Griselda ordered Sepúlveda's death for taking her son Michael to Colombia against her will. The execution, according to official US state sources, would have taken place in front of the child.
The descendants of Griselda Blanco
According to the US Department of Justice report, the years that Blanco lived in California may have been her happiest years: there she lived a life of opulence, surrounded by all her children, “whom she encouraged to be so cruel and corrupt as she”. “Her son Osvaldo is said to have spent enormous fortunes on his habit of scattering fresh orchids daily in the family pool, perhaps to remind his mother of her roots in Medellín, the City of Orchids,” according to the Department of Justice.
Griselda Blanco's first three children were the ones she had with Trujillo: Osvaldo, Uber and Dixon. After their heyday, and thanks to their involvement in the family business, they were all in prisons in the United States and were murdered due to disputes with other drug cartels, according to reports published in the local media.
Jhon Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco was murdered in the early 1990s by gunmen in a tavern in Medellín while Blanco was in prison. Dixon, detained at the same time as his mother, according to the same reports, was murdered as soon as he regained his freedom in 1992. Uber, finally, was also murdered in an alleged settling of scores while his mother was serving her sentence, according to the Colombian newspaper The time.
Michael Corleone Sepúlveda Blanco, the son that Blanco had with Sepúlveda and who he named after the mobster Michael Corleone, is the only one who survives her today and, until recently, he even had a public Instagram profile in which he shared memories and information about your family.
Blanco's youngest son was also involved in the family business, although, according to El Tiempo, he was nothing more than a traveling cocaine distributor. Citing an episode from 2011, when he was captured by authorities in Miami, the report states that “the police officer who handcuffed Corleone stated that, upon reading him his rights, he repeated: 'My mother is going to kill me.'
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m Robert Neff, a professional writer and editor. I specialize in the entertainment section, providing up-to-date coverage on the latest developments in film, television and music. My work has been featured on World Stock Market and other prominent publications.
