Author Topic: Griselda Blanco - The patronness of evil  (Read 80 times)

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raul

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Griselda Blanco - The patronness of evil
« on: June 12, 2022, 09:53:15 am »
Taken from Spanish author Juan José Revenga

The black widow: Griselda Blanco
From the beginning, Colombia has operated in a different way. The business was invented there and there are still powerful cartels, like the ones Corbin (a character in Revenga´s novel) had known in his travels through the country. In Colombia, violence and fear tactics were invented to achieve more power.

When only marijuana arrived in the United States, and in bad and scarce ways, a woman, Griselda Blanco Restrepo, appeared. It was the beginning of the seventies of the last century, and almost nobody had heard of the millionaire white powder.

Griselda was a tormented woman from Medellín, with a terrible childhood: she was raped by her stepfather and victim of a thousand other misfortunes. Until, at the age of eleven, she committed her first murder: a group she was part of kidnapped a child and, as the ransom was not paid, she herself blew his brains out. She was lucky enough to meet Carlos Trujillo, her first husband.

He, as expected, was not a minister, but a man who was dedicated to making false U.S. passports and visas. With him she traveled to the United States and got to know that world, which seemed luxurious and within the reach of anyone. They had three children and they were together until Carlos died, burst by alcohol, and Griselda, without letting the corpse cool, left with her lover Alberto Bravo. Together they started the drug trafficking business in New York, and she became known as the "patroness of evil" for her extreme cruelty: if someone did not comply, no matter if he paid or not, she had to execute him.

This is, more or less, how (Joaquin El) Chapo Guzman would act years later. Until his arrival, if a shipment was lost, nothing happened, but when he arrived, he personally blew off the head of whoever had lost it, thus preventing shipments from being lost again.

But there is no room for two tigers in a cage, and Bravo tried to trick Griselda with the finances. They traveled to Colombia to settle accounts and such was the shooting1 that was mounted, that the meeting room ended up full of wounded, including Griselda, with a bullet in the gut. But it was worse for Bravo because "the godmother" blew his face off and he died on the spot.

From that moment on, they began to call her the black widow for her wickedness and for killing all her husbands. She already had two, but all those who approached her or had a relationship with her, ended up in the ground before their time. She was a terrible woman, even with her own (she once had one of her men cut to pieces for having called her fat).

The black widow was the inventor of the system of working with mules, transporting the drugs inside the body. But very soon it was insufficient because the demand was growing. It was the mid-seventies and the market had skyrocketed to levels that only a few savvy people were able to see and began to work for her. One of those thousands of employees she had and who learned everything Griselda knew was a certain Pablo Escobar. The black widow also had a son with Dario Sepulveda, who wanted him

to be her successor and capo of all capos. He named him Michael Corleone. Dario did not want that future for his son and escaped with him to Medellin. Crass mistake, because Griselda found him and killed him in the middle of the street.

Griselda had her heyday in the eighties, but success and violence brought her to the limelight. She created a gang war in the streets of Miami that set off all the alarms. Miami became a lawless city where the municipality had to rent refrigerated trucks to store the dead that had been caused during the night.

Seeing how the circle was closing around her, the black widow fled to Los Angeles but, thanks to the confession of her employees and confidants, the DEA caught up with her on February 1, 1985. Once again, and thanks to her cunning and buying off witnesses and prosecutors, she managed to get a sentence of only twenty years for the more than two hundred murders of which she was accused.

In one of her outbursts of arrogance and egocentrism, she even tried to kidnap President Kennedy's son to exchange him for her freedom. She did not succeed, but made several attempts.

In 2004, she was finally released and deported to Colombia. All the big capos had already fallen years ago. Many of them, like Escobar, who had started with her, had already been dead for more than a decade, either at the hands of the DEA or by the bullet that bore her name since they had entered the business.

Everyone thought that in Medellín Griselda had no chance of surviving more than a month. But it was not like that: like all the great assassins or dictators, everything pointed to the fact that she was going to have a placid old age, without purging a single one of her sins. But fate crossed her life on December 3, 2012, when two boys on a motorcycle stopped next to her as she was leaving the fishmonger's and put two bullets in her head. At the age of sixty-nine, much older than anyone would have thought, Griselda the godmother, the true evil lady and the true beginning of all the horrors that have happened and will come to Colombia, died in the streets of Medellin.

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