MIAMI – War followed Griselda Blanco. She was born in Colombia’s Caribbean region of Cartagena-Santa Marta where the use of violence over agrarian disputes and smuggling highly dictated bipartisan politics.
World War II polarized the country. By the time Griselda was 5 years old, the political divisions exploded into a 10-year civil war. Headlines included the bayoneting of infants and crucifixions.
In 1982, Luis Salas, a criminologist, told former Local 10 News reporter Mark Potter that the 1948-1958 civil war known as “La Violencia” had traumatized an entire generation of Colombians.
“They were moved from one area to another area. They saw violence and death constantly. Vengeance became a way of life. Settling disputes outside the law became a way of life,” Salas said. “The legal system collapsed and corruption was rampant, so if you grew up under those conditions, it would have a severe effect later on in terms of how you were going to react.”
Griselda moved to Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, known as both the “city of eternal spring” and the “city of flowers.” She was a teenage girl when she wed her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, a human trafficker in the business of fake identifications.
By her 20s, Blanco was a mother to Trujillo’s three sons, and “La Violencia” had devolved into an internal conflict with far-left Marxist–Leninist guerrilla groups. Meanwhile, in the area where she was born, the tradition of bloody reckonings continued.
There was a vendetta between the Cárdenas and the Valdeblánquez families that lasted decades. José Cárdenas killed his cousin Hilario Valdeblánquez in 1970. The lives of the men who had either of the last names were constantly at risk.
By her 30s, Blanco was a widow in Medellin. The cocaine boom had started. She wed her second husband, Alberto Bravo, a Medellin Cartel trafficker. Colombians were buying the cocaine base from farmers in Bolivia and Peru, and refining it.
Men and women got paid to conceal the cocaine in everything from lingerie to dog cages to get it to the U.S. It didn’t take long for a court in New York to issue a warrant for Blanco’s arrest in 1974. Carmen Caban, a former drug dealer, testified against her, records show.
Meanwhile, in Colombia, lawlessness dominated the streets of Medellin. Motorbikes with two riders fled swiftly after brazen daylight drive-by shootings. Guerrilla fighters engaged in kidnapping for ransom. Marta Ochoa Vásquez, of The Ochoa drug lords’ family, was abducted in 1981 outside of a private university.
Guerrilla fighters also attempted to abduct Carlos Lehder, Pablo Escobar’s associate, and the owner of Cayo Norman in the Bahamas — but he escaped. The kidnappings were so out of control that the cocaine traffickers used $8 million, to set up the “Muerte A Secuestradores,” Spanish for Death To Kidnappers.
Soon after, a woman turned up handcuffed to a fence at the office of a newspaper in Medellin with a MAS sign identifying her as a kidnapper. Some suspects were killed. Lehder signed a full-page MAS ad that was published in a Colombian newspaper to warn the kidnappers of the severe punishment that awaited them.
The violence escalated without much consequence. After the murders of Judges Ana Cecilia Cartajena Hernandez and Jairo Marin Jaramillo in Medellin, over 100 judges resigned. City officials banned motorcyclists from having a rider and outlawed helmets.
“We live in fear,” Medellin’s Chief Judge Flor Palacio told Potter in 1982, adding that there were about a dozen homicides daily in the city, including a machine-gun shooting that had killed six people at a real estate office in Medellin’s posh Poblado neighborhood.
Public officials and prominent entrepreneurs and professionals were also targets. In three days, during the Christmas season, there were 35 murders. And during a January 1982 weekend, 11 murder victims ended up in garbage cans on the city outskirts.
“I received more than 15 calls telling me I was going to die,” Rodolfo Garcia, the former head of the judicial police narcotics unit, told Potter in 1982, adding that the only reason he was alive was because the Colombian government was protecting him.
Medellin was home to many of the assassins and victims who turned up in Miami. The city was home to the first major drug cartel in Colombia.
When the cocaine boom peaked in the 1980s, Blanco was married to her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, who was known as a hitman. She had invested in real estate in Miami when they had a son. Detectives believe she hired the men who killed Sepulveda and took their son in 1983, in Medellin.
DEA agents arrested Blanco, then 42, on Feb. 17, 1985, in Irvine, California, for narcotrafficking, and accused her of carrying a false ID. Her trial in 1985 was from June 25 to July 9, and the jury found her guilty of one count of conspiracy to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine.
In Colombia, the conviction concerned cocaine traffickers. Some issued death threats against the Supreme Court justices who were to decide whether or not Colombia was going to extradite them to the U.S. From Nov. 6-7, 1985, an armed group of guerrilla fighters took over the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, and 12 Supreme Court justices died.
In U.S. federal court, Blanco was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined $25,000 on Nov. 8, 1985. In Colombia, authorities arrested Lehder, Escobar’s associate, during a party on Feb. 4, 1987, near Medellin, and extradited him for narcotrafficking to the U.S.
In Barranquilla, near where Blanco was born, the Valdeblánquez family had one last Cárdenas heir to kill. In 1989, a 13-year-old boy, Hugo Cárdenas, was waiting for his school bus to pick him up. His father and his grandfather were dead. Men on a motorcycle killed him.
Meanwhile, in a U.S. prison, Lehder became a protected witness in the case against Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega, who played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Noriega was convicted of eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1992.
On Dec. 2, 1993, Escobar, better known as “El Patrón” for his control of the cocaine supply chain and making the Forbes’ Billionaires list for seven years, died on the rooftop of a house in Medellin after a shootout with police. The Medellin Cartel disbanded.
Cocaine was still readily available throughout the U.S. Colombia’s Cali Cartel stepped up to fill the void and smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. and Europe, and laundered billions of dollars with the help of investors, bankers, lawyers, logistics experts, and chemists.
In 2002, Blanco suffered a heart attack in prison and was released a few years later. She returned to Medellin and an assassin on a motorcycle killed her on Sept. 3, 2012. Noriega died at a hospital in Panama on May 29, 2017.
The Cali Cartel also came to an end in a federal courtroom in Miami. In 2006, the cartel’s leaders Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, 63, and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, 67, were sentenced to 30 years in prison. Drug trafficking has changed with the arrival of synthetic drugs.
In 2020, Lehder was released from a U.S. prison and deported to Germany, where his father was born. The recent Netflix fictional dramatization of “Griselda” Blanco’s life precedes Lehder’s book, “Life and Death of the Medellin Cartel,” set to be released on Feb. 27.