© Elizabeth Morris/Netflix
Griselda Blanco was a cruel key figure in the Medellín Cartel. A new Netflix series tells her story.
“The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” This sentence appears at the beginning of a new Netflix series. But it is the name of the person giving the quote, which follows with a delay that increases the effect, that triggers the pleasant feeling of horror: Pablo Escobar. As is well known, the hippopotamus lover and drug lord was not squeamish himself. How dangerous must this woman Blanco have been?
The series “Griselda” is now about to tell the story of the woman who taught Pablo Escobar to fear. She is played by Sofia Vergara, best known from the comedy “Modern Family”. There she portrays the cliché of an extremely spirited, heavily accented Latino woman, the much younger wife of the family patriarch. The only thing she has in common with Griselda is that she is also Colombian, just as Vergara herself was born in Barranquilla.
From Medellín to Miami
“Griselda” begins with the title character’s escape from Medellín to Miami, along with her three sons. She assures her friend who they are staying with that she no longer wants to have anything to do with drug dealing. But the kilo of cocaine that she hid under the teddy bear in her youngest son’s suitcase tells a different story. Griselda wants to build her own business in Miami, and she doesn’t let a mediocre middleman who rips her off stop her. What are baseball bats for?
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Cocaine distribution industry
Gradually, it is shown in flashbacks that Griselda and her husband, or rather his family, were no small cogs in the global cocaine distribution industry.
The first episode ends with a massacre, a deal and the realization that Griselda Blanco won’t put up with anything – whether in Medellín or Miami. Vergara plays the “business woman” very intensely, the 70s are atmospherically captured in the usual brown tones. However, if you don’t like reading subtitles but don’t understand Colombian Spanish, you might give up in annoyance. Would be a pity.