Is 'Griselda' Based on a True Story?

Griselda, Netflix's new six-part series starring Sofia Vergara, Alberto Guerra, and Juliana Aiden Martinez, is a fictionalized account of Colombian drug trafficker Griselda Blanco’s rise to power in the 1970s and ’80s. Blanco carved a spot for herself at the top of the male-dominated illegal drug business by cornering the distribution market in southern Florida. She was famously violent, committing and ordering numerous dozens of murders during her lifetime, and for inspiring the respect, if not the admiration, of her rivals.

The show was conceived and co-produced by, among others, Vergara and veteran showrunner and producer Eric Newman (his past work includes Narcos and Narcos: Mexico) and it focuses on the period of Blanco’s life after she fled Colombia with her three children and set up business in Miami. It was shot in Art Deco nightclubs and low-rise mid-century neighborhoods and is populated with characters based on a who’s who of notorious 1980s criminals.

A few weeks before Griselda’s debut, Newman spoke to T&C about the genesis of the series and how closely he and his colleagues stuck to Griselda Blanco’s real life story while creating their show.

What was the real Griselda Blanco like?

Blanco comes up often in a number of books, documentaries, and journalism, though she remained largely unknown in her time compared to the drug lords based in Colombia. She was best known for the distribution network she created and for the violence that she used so freely. She was an affiliate of the Medellín cartel but they were pretty disparaging about her.

What's interesting about Griselda is how misunderstood or, I believe, misrepresented she was. In the narcotics world, the existence of someone as anomalistic as Griselda demanded an explanation that made sense to the men who were afraid of her. You couldn’t diminish what she accomplished: how many people she killed, the control she had over what was for a long time really the point of entry for all the cocaine that came into America. So they disparaged her. "She's a beast. She's a demon. She's a psychopath.”

Netflix

Griselda Blanco, played by Sofia Vergara, assembled an army of enforcers for her drug distribution network.

The reality was probably closer to [how we portray her in] our show. The people who worked for her loved her, they would do anything for her. She could talk you into stabbing a guy to death in [Miami] airport in front of hundreds of people. But Griselda Blanco, for reasons probably having to do with her childhood—she was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend and her mother blamed her and kicked her out—couldn’t trust anybody. That came up in her life over and over.

Sofia Vergara approached you about Blanco, right?

Yes, she had all this research compiled about Griselda and wanted to make a show. Like Griselda, Sofia is from Colombia and is a single mother who came to Miami and made something of herself. I think Sofia recognized what they had in common although, obviously, that's about where the similarities end.

We weren't sure where to start the story. We picked the Miami years partially because it's the last time you could really root for Blanco. But we also chose that period because we could be certain of events. No one can say for sure what Griselda was doing before she got to Miami, but there's a pretty clear trail of evidence—the murders and her taking control of the business and then the Ochoas coming into Miami—that we could rely on as our fence posts for what really happened.

Were any of the other characters in Griselda based on real-life people?

Oh yes, many of them were, including Dario Sepulveda, Marto Ochoa, and of course, [Miami police officer] June Hawkins. Hawkins was part of a task force that worked with the FBI and DEA to fight the drug-related homicide epidemic in Miami. Before we started shooting, [Griselda co-creator] Doug Miro and I flew out to Tennessee to interview June and her husband Al, who is also a character in the show. Listening to her stories, we immediately realized that June would be a great mirror to Griselda in that she was, at the time we cover in the show, a single mother of Latin descent who had also found herself in an incredibly macho world. The stuff June had to put up with as a young woman in the police department back then was crazy. But June studied Griselda and saw early on what other people didn't want to believe—that there was a woman at the center of all of this violence.

Netflix

Griselda Blanco started out smuggling narcotics from Colombia to the U.S.

Was Blanco really that violent?

Something to remember is that a whole generation of Colombians, including Pablo Escobar and Griselda Blanco, were shaped by La Violencia, which was basically an undeclared civil war in Colombia in the 1940s and ’50s. People were killed indiscriminately in this period, and if you came of age around then, or your parents lived through it, it did something to you. And if there was other damage, in Griselda case’s it was sexual abuse, subjugation, and abandonment, it could shape you. At some point Blanco decided, I'm going to put myself in a position where no one can ever hurt me again. Of course, that's not possible.