MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – Local 10 recently traveled to the winding streets of Medellin, Colombia, into barrio Antioquia, where a young Griselda Blanco was coming of age decades ago.
“From 1946 to 1966, 200,000 Colombians were killed in a political bloodbath called ‘La Violencia,’” former Local 10 reporter Mark Potter said. “You could argue an entire generation -- perhaps even more -- were traumatized. They moved from one area to another area. They saw violence and death constantly.”
It shaped the woman who would become one of the world’s most notorious drug traffickers, who would leave a permanent mark on South Florida and who inspired Hollywood to craft its own portrayal of her life in a Netflix miniseries starring Sofia Vergara.
Local 10 is told that Blanco still has family in Medellin, along with friend and hitman Carlos Vanegas, who says he spent 35 years behind bars defending Blanco.
“She studied and so did I,” he told Local 10′s Janine Stanwood in Spanish. “She turned bad when she was 15.”
“What do you think now? There are movies about Griselda. What do you think?” Stanwood asked.
“No good, no good,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because it’s a lot of lies,” Vanegas responded.
The truth about Blanco depends on who you ask.
By the time she arrived to South Florida after fleeing a drug conviction in New York, Blanco’s network was growing.
Law enforcement believed she was behind a web of violent crimes, but it was the bloody shootout at the Dadeland Mall in 1979 when cops made the connection.
Potter chronicled the drug wars in real time.
“The cases were linked and they went back to this woman,” he said. “They kept hearing about this woman, Griselda Blanco.”
Longtime Local 10 reporter Michael Putney was there at the time.
“The day of the Dadeland massacre, I knew this would be a pivotal kind of turning point for South Florida,” he said. “It was just brutal.”
“Had you ever seen a crime scene like that?” Stanwood asked.
“No, no I had not,” Putney said.
Former West Miami Police Chief Nelson Andreu was a young homicide detective then.
“I, at the beginning, said, ‘How can a woman be this ruthless?’” he told Stanwood. “It was discovered relatively quickly that Griselda had something to do with those shootings.”
Blanco was eventually tracked down in California and convicted of drug trafficking. And while some detectives tell us they think she was behind more than 100 killings, Blanco was found responsible for just three killings in South Florida.
She was eventually released from prison in 2004 and deported back to Colombia.
This is what Andreu said back then:
“She is going to be deported. Fortunately, not left in the United States and I think she’s going to face the fate of her sons and other family members that were part of that organization. And I really don’t think she’s going to last that long alive in Colombia.”
Griselda would meet that fate, but not until years later.
There’s so much more about her final years in Colombia -- the places she frequented here in South Florida and what her youngest son thinks.
The Local 10 special “Griselda: The Real Madrina” will air Wednesday at 8 p.m.
You will meet the detectives who helped take down Blanco. We are also sitting down with her surviving son and traveling to Colombia where her story started and ended.