The 2024 Netflix miniseries Griseldastarred Sofía Vergara as Griselda Blanco, the real-life Colombian drug lord who played a central role in the brutal Miami drug war of the 1970s and 1980s. However, as dark as the plot of Griselda can get, the true story of the real Griselda Blanco is a far bloodier tale. At times, Griselda almost paints Vergara’s version of Blanco as an antihero of sorts. When examining the true story of Griselda Blanco that inspired the show, however, it quickly becomes clear this is far from an accurate depiction of the woman who became known as “The Black Widow”.
The true story of Griselda Blanco reveals the inspiration behind Griselda wasn’t a woman who became a ruthless drug baron to protect herself and her family. The 2024 Netflix miniseries exercised many creative liberties when bringing Blanco’s story to screens to create a compelling central protagonist viewers could empathize with. However, the real-life Colombian drug lord at the center of the Griselda true story is far from the pseudo-antihero the Netflix miniseries depicts her to be.
Griselda is a drama centering around notorious Colombian cocaine-based drug trader Griselda Blanco, and her rise to prominence throughout the 1980s.
The Real Drug Lord That Inspired Netflix’s Griselda Explained
Griselda Blanco Is One Of Colombia's Most Infamous Cocaine Smugglers
Netflix’s miniseries Griselda was one of the best original shows to arrive on the streaming platform in 2024, and became instantly recognized as one of the best performances from Modern Family star Sofía Vergara. However, as larger-than-life as Vergara’s titular character seems, she isn’t fictional. Griselda is inspired by, and a sometimes-loose adaptation of, the rise to power of real-life Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco. The Netflix miniseries may have made several changes to specific details of the true story, but overall portrayed just how ruthless the real Griselda Blanco was incredibly authentically.
However, Griselda on Netflix only focused on a specific period of Griselda Blanco’s life, namely her moving to the U.S. and becoming a key player in the Miami drug war that had the Florida city gripped in a brutal wave of violent crime throughout the 1970s and 1980s. While this was perhaps the most historically significant time when it comes to the real Griselda Blanco’s rise to infamy as one of the most brutal Colombian drug lords involved in the international narcotics trade, her early years were just as eventful.
Griselda Blanco was born in northern Colombia in 1943, but relocated with her mother to Medellín, known also for the notorious Medellín cartel, when she was 3. She became an active criminal from an incredibly young age, including allegedly kidnapping and murdering another child when she was only 11(via Maxim). However, outside of this incident, it’s unknown if she committed any further murders in her younger years. All that’s been confirmed when it comes to Griselda Blanco’s activities during this time is that she carried out mostly petty crimes such as pickpocketing until she reached adulthood. However, by her early 20s, she was involved in smuggling narcotics from Colombia into the United States.
What Crimes The Real Griselda Blanco Committed
The Netflix Miniseries Barely Scratched The Surface
Griselda on Netflix didn’t shy away from portraying Vergara’s semi-fictionalized version of Griselda Blanco as a violent criminal, one unafraid to end lives if she felt it necessary to further or protect her interests. However, the real Griselda Blanco was far more ruthless than her on-screen counterpart and responsible for considerably more deaths than the Netflix miniseries portrayed. The exact number of murders carried out by Griselda Blanco is unknown, but it’s thought she could be responsible, either directly or through instructing her subordinates, for over 200 deaths (via Vice).
As the Netflix miniseries also showed, several of Griselda Blanco’s victims were her husbands. It’s widely believed that the murder of Blanco’s first husband, Carlos Trujillo, was carried out on her orders due to a failed business deal (though they were divorced by the time of his death). This occurred many years before the events depicted in Griselda, and took place while she and Trujillo operated a cannabis dealing ring within Colombia.
While Sophia Vergara’s version of Blanco is portrayed as a reluctant newcomer to this enterprise at first, the true story is very different.
The murder of Griselda Blanco’s second husband, Alberto Bravo (played in Griselda by Alberto Ammann), was a key event during the first episode of the Netflix miniseries. However, while Griselda accurately portrays the fact that Blanco is believed to have ended Bravo’s life with her own hands, there’s no evidence to suggest this was out of revenge for a forced sexual encounter. In the Netflix miniseries, Blanco executes Bravo after he forces her to sleep with his brother. In reality, this likely never happened, and it’s believed that the real Griselda Blanco killed Alberto Bravo due to a business dispute.
As for the narcotics smuggling activities of the real Griselda Blanco, the Netflix show focuses on her involvement in the Miami drug war. However, while Sophia Vergara’s version of Blanco is portrayed as a reluctant newcomer to this enterprise at first, the true story is very different. The real Griselda Blanco had already run a thriving narcotics operation in New York alongside Alberto Bravo, and was much more directly involved than Griselda insinuated. This lasted from 1964 until she and Bravo were forced to flee back to Columbia in 1975 after authorities identified them as the ringleaders of the operation.
This is perhaps the biggest deviation from the true story when it comes to how Griselda Blanco’s entry into the Miami narcotics trade was portrayed in Griselda. Sophia Vergara’s version of Blanco was depicted as a woman forced to grasp the intricacies of the international drug smuggling trade as she went along, being unused to running such a large scale operation by herself. In real life, Griselda Blanco was already an efficient, experienced, and ruthless career criminal by the time she arrived in Miami in the late 1970s.
How The Real Griselda Blanco Died
The Violent Drug Lord Met A Violent End
Griselda Blanco was arrested in 1985 following a DEA raid on her home, at which point she was thought to be handling the illegal import of at least 300kg of cocaine per month(via Business Insider). She was tried in New York City and initially sentenced to 15 years behind bars. However, her sentence was increased in 1998 to three 20-year stretches following her conviction for three counts of second-degree murder, to which she pleaded guilty.
Blanco’s death wasn’t covered in Griselda but was just as dramatic as anything depicted in the Netflix miniseries.
While it seemed that Griselda Blanco would end up dying in prison, she was released in 2004 on compassionate grounds due to her ailing health. She was extradited back to Colombia, where she remained until she died in 2012. While it’s not thought that the real Griselda Blanco returned to her life of crime during those years, it’s clear she couldn’t escape her past.
Blanco’s death wasn’t covered in Griselda but was just as dramatic as anything depicted in the Netflix miniseries. In September 2012, while visiting a local butcher with her daughter-in-law, Griselda Blanco was shot in the head twice by an unknown assassin on a motorcycle. This style of execution was deliberate, as it was Blanco’s own preferred method when ordering many of the killings she sanctioned during her time as one of the central figures in the Miami underworld.
Netflix's Griselda sees the crime lord's tumultuous rise to power, but the limited series' final episode explores how this all came tumbling down.
What The Netflix Show Changed About The True Story
Alongside Many Minor Detail Changes, Griselda Blanco Was Portrayed As A More Sympathetic Character
While Griselda portrayed many aspects of the real Griselda Blanco and her rise through the Miami narcotics trade accurately in a broader sense, there were also many changes made to both her character and story for the 2024 miniseries. The most notable of these is that Griselda frames Blanco as a character viewers can empathize with, especially in the earlier episodes.
However, the real-life Griselda Blanco wasn’t the victim of circumstance or criminal-through-necessity the miniseries paints her as. She was ruthless and calculated when it came to the violence and bloodshed she caused. However, had Griselda shown her personality more accurately, she wouldn’t have been a suitable protagonist. Viewers would have found her impossible to see as anything other than a villain in her own story, which makes this particular creative decision by Netflix somewhat understandable.
However, Griselda didn’t entirely shy away from the real Griselda Blanco’s true nature either. Many moments in the miniseries delved into how dark her inclinations became during the height of her power and as her downfall loomed. The most prominent example of this is the group sex parties in which Blanco would force people to become intimate at gunpoint. Ultimately, like many Netflix shows inspired by true crime and real criminals, Griseldais a semi-fictionalized adaptation of real events, and the changes made are done so to craft historical fact into an engaging narrative.
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Griselda is a Netflix mini-series inspired by the savvy and ambitious Colombian businesswoman Griselda Blanco, who created one of the most profitable cartels in history. A devoted mother, Blanco’s lethal blend of charm and unsuspected savagery helped her expertly navigate between family and business, leading her to become widely known as the “Godmother.”
Release Date
January 25, 2024
Cast
Alberto Ammann
, Paulina Davila
, Alberto Guerra
, Martin Rodriguez
, Sofia Vergara
, Diego Trujillo
, Juliana Aidén Martinez
, Christian Tappan
, Gabriel Sloyer
, Vanessa Ferlito
, José Zúñiga
Creator(s)
Doug Miro
, Eric Newman
, Carlo Bernard
, Ingrid Escajeda
English (US) ·