Griselda Blanco: A Brief Story Of A Serial Killer

When you hear the name “Black Widow,” you would more than likely think

of the spider. Perhaps you might imagine the comic book character. Griselda

Blanco is neither the arachnid nor the fictional characters. Her legacy of fear,

murder, and paranoia are very real. With 250 (known) she either paid for,

sponsored or executed personally, she has been coined one of the most savage

and murderous people in organized crime.

Griselda Blanco, “The Godmother” (later known as the “Black Widow”) was

born February 15, 1943 in Cartagena, Colombia. At the age of three, her mother,

Ana Lucia Restrepo moved the two of them to Medallin, Colombia to a tent-style

home along the mountainside. It is here where Blanco developed very early a

numbness to crime, death and

violence. The area in which she began to grow up
was extremely impoverished and run down. There was no electricity or indoor
plumbing. People in the area really governed and took care of themselves. Just
as in a number of Latin American countries, severe violence was part of
everyday life and became a “norm” to see/be a part of.
Colombia has a deep rooted violent history dating back to the 40s.
“Between 1948 and 1958, the Republic of Colombia was the scene of
widespread and systematic political violence, known as La Violencia. An
estimated 200,000 people were killed during this period, including 112,000
between 1948 and 1950 alone,” (tufts.edu. 2016. Para 1). On a day to day basis
the Godmother, as well as countless other children in the region would encounter
dead bodies scattered around town. At that time in the country, kids like Blanco
would be the traffickers moving whatever to make money, all the while seeing
their parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and the rest of their families
murdered daily (whether involved in any “activity” or not).
Associates of the Godmother have spoken on memories of her childhood,
she shared with them. She along with other kids in the slum would dig shallow
ditches and pushes whatever bodies that were laying around town into them. It
became a sort of entertainment for them. Growing up, not fearing death from the
time of a toddler molded her to being cold and callous when it came time to get
dirty. As a result of this harsh upbringing, by 11 she along with some other
children who had access to weapons, kidnapped a well off Colombian child from
down the hill for random. When they never received payment for the kid, the

Godmother was given a gun and instructed to shoot the boy between the eyes,
which she did. From that first moment of bloodshed, the inner murderous savage
nature began to grow and only continued as more obstacles and hardships in her
life constantly added fuel to that fire.
After running away from home at 14 just after a brutal altercation with her mother
and surviving on the street by being a prostitute well into her 20s, Blanco met her
first husband Carlos Trujillo and had her first three sons; Dixon, Uber and
Osvaldo. It’s at this stage in her life that this is possibly the last time she ever
lived a normal organized crime free life. Once she met her 2nd husband Alberto
Bravo, the era of the ‘Cocaine Queen’ came to be. The two moving to America to
New York changed the ways of organized crime. She moved over $10 million in
cocaine a week, making her a major trafficker. Moving that amount of product at
a time pushed her far ahead of anything American police and DEA officials had
ever seen, making her a target having to move to Miami where her real legacy
began. The empire she created stacked and stacked building her resume ever
deeper than it already was. She turned Miami upside down. Of course there will
always be killing when your talking about drugs, but the level it got to while she
was there got to immenslt high numbers. “Seeking to eliminate her competition,
she displayed a brazen ruthlessness that plunged the city into a period of
violence that became known as the Cocaine Cowboy Wars.

She allegedly

motorcycles, a practice she was said to have invented,” (Tikkanen. Para 3.

2018).

At the same time as her moving and distributing massive amounts of

cocaine, the level in which she was feared grew. Doing business with her came

with the risk of one day you, your family, and anyone you could have ever held

close to you l, becoming targets. Even something that to the average that would

appear small, could land you in a body bag when it came to Griselda Blanco.

There were no rules when it came to engaging business with her because in an

instant she could shift and either it made difference if you were a stranger or

considered family, if you crossed her you could guarantee your life would soon

be over. Both her 2nd and 3rd husbands found themselves at the end of her gun

for “disrespecting or betraying” her. Whether she killed herself or hired the hit put

on them, she made sure they were dead and took pride in the talking of a life.

According to a former associate and lover of hers, Charles Cosby, Blanco once

stated that she was the, “Baddest b**** to take a breath.” When you pause and

think on the mindset of a person who proclaims such a statement, you

can
imagine how much higher she deemed herself over others.
Taking a step back and looking at the numerous contributing factors to her
life, her unnatural comfortability with violence and death all lead back to her
childhood and the environment she was brought up in. Starting from age 11 she
was placed in an environment of violence and death. A child walking through the
streets ducking from bullets and walking past dead bodies is not a normal thing
nor is it healthy on a persons mental state. Add this to the fact that her mother
was an abusive alcoholic and surviving by prostituting at 14 all predisposed her
to having a numb callous demeanor with violence. Routine Activities Threory
describes this dysfunctional relationship with her mother as, “the absence of a
capable guardian who can prevent the crime from happening.” (Myers. Para 5.
2016). After this exposure to a hostile environment during childhood, it was
almost inevitable that she would find herself surrounded by similar things in her
adult life. “Felson and Cohen (1980) postulate that criminal activities are a
“structurally significant phenomenon,” meaning that violations are neither random
nor trivial events (390). In consequence, it is the routine of activities people
partake in over the course of their day and night lives that makes some
individuals more susceptible to being viewed as suitable targets by a rationally
calculating offender. Routine activities theory relates the pattern of offending to
the everyday patterns of social interaction,” (Myers. Para 6. 2016).
The way she ran her business and the way she dealt out punishment
reflects back to what she saw as a child. When you’re 11 years old and
instructed to shoot another child between the eyes, you would think that would
damage and make a person become more reserved. On the contrary. Blanco
seem to thrive from it. The hardest her upbringing put her through made her
numb you don’t have the ability to feel remorse. She gained a certain level of
power from within by feeding on the fear she could instill in people by just
knowing who they were. There was no place you could hide that she couldn’t
reach you.
She had a somewhat scary level of reach. This sort of behavior and chaos
showed a level of distrust for people or lack of preservation of life. She trusted
people but didn’t trust people in the same breath. She had associates that she
had been with since the beginnings of her business that turned and sided with
enemies. Changes like that will make anyone constantly look over her shoulder
and have zero remorse or hesitation when it came time to retaliate or simply
eliminate what she saw as a roadblock. With a mindset like this in her prime it’s a
dangerous thing to be around. Its unnatural.