Who was Griselda Blanco, the Cartel leader played by Sofía Vergara in the new Netflix series?

Griselda Blanco’s story is of blood, ashes and poverty. Her life passed through a certain gloom, eclipsed on many occasions by the fame that the media - both the small and big screens - bestowed on the man who once sheltered under her wing: Pablo Escobar. But the streets do not forget. And neither does the cinematographer.

Now Sofia Vergara’s challenge is huge: to embody the feared Black Widow, the Cocaine Godmother. To revive, between clapperboard and script, Griselda Blanco.

Griselda Blanco Restrepo opened her eyes for the first time in 1943. The planet had to learn to live after the terror of a Second World War that forever changed how things worked on planet Earth. The guns ceased to cackle in Europe yet the echoes began to be heard far away. In Colombia, ‘La Violencia’ began, two decades of acute internal conflict that had its roots within the historical problem of land, concentrated only in few hands and no effective agrarian reform; the conflict ended with almost 200,000 Colombians dead. Griselda was born into a poor family and into the middle of this tragic set of circumstances that, somehow, she never left.

According to the voice of a former lover, her childhood knew no other emotion than fear. But not her own. Poverty made her steal purses and prostitute herself, survive day by day by the use of force and flavour of blood. On one occasion she even kidnapped a child and asked for a reward. Perhaps it was the ticking countdown, which ran out without the boy’s parents raising enough money for his ransom; maybe it was the tip-off to the police. Griselda was eleven years old when she decided to shoot that gun.

She flew from Cartagena with barely two pesos in her wallet and arrived in Medellín. At the age of 21 she already had three children, suffered the abuse of her mother’s boyfriend and married an unscrupulous delinquent. Rumour has it that she would later have him killed. In any case, that would come later; after meeting her second husband, Alberto Bravo, she entered fully into a world that would change her country decades later: Drug trafficking.

That part of her life unfolded on two planes, in a constant flight between the United States and Colombia, from which he would never get off. It was 1976 when, together with Pablo Escobar, the Ochoas, Carlos Lehder and many others when the drug war broke out in Miami, she founded what was named by the DEA and the FBI as the Medellin Cartel. She didn’t know it then, or maybe she did, but she had entered the history books through the back door.

Blanco was good at being bad. No one was better at taking lives and turning death into business. She squandered banknotes with an almost inherited ease, dressing up in extravagant costumes and feeding the peculiar face that all legends need. When hitmen ambushed her husband and ended his life, everyone looked at Griselda. Other versions say that it was Griselda herself who did the ugly deed when she discovered that he had been cheating on her. One way or another, as if she had drunk his soul, she adopted the nickname of Black Widow. And Blanco believed it to such an extent that she made real the cultural canon that all resentful mobsters have a merciless mother behind them: she called her last son Michael Corleone.

During this time she was as inexorable as she was untouchable. She was the opposite face of mercy. Blanco surrounded herself with Los Pistoleros, an organised group of assassins who would only accept membership in the gang if, after killing someone, they mutilated them. The streets were filled with ownerless limbs. The dead multiplied under her reign of terror, taking everything along the way - husbands included - and the leadership became more than a triumvirate as she elevated Pablo Escobar, whose potential had not gone unnoticed by her, to the top.

And so, amidst blood and mountains of money (she took home more than $80 million a month), Blanco appeared to have approached immortality right as she left the streets. The police eventually caught up with her, handing her a sentence, with a confession of one of the Pistoleros who once defended her thrown in, of 20 years and La Patrona went to prison. When she got out in 2004, the world was a very different place. The cartel had collapsed several years ago and others were now pulling the strings of drug trafficking. Her empire was reduced to the memory of the streets, which always carried, and will always carry, her name tattooed into the sidewalks.

September 3, 2012 was a normal and ordinary day. Griselda was close to her 70th birthday and was about to shop at the Cardiso butcher’s on the corner of 29th Street in Medellín. On her shopping list she had veal and rump steak; Griselda paid and left. When she went through the door and saw the sunlight, she did not have time to even be surprised. Bang. Bang. Two shots in the head before the perpetrator sped off on a motorcycle, as quick and simple as had happened when Griselda was in her prime.