‘Griselda’: What’s Fact & What’s Fiction in the Netflix Series?
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Griselda.]
The new Netflix miniseries Griselda doesn’t profess to be a documentary about Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, played on the show by Sofía Vergara. But you might be surprised how accurate the show is about the lives of this 80s-era cartel head and the people around her.
In a recent interview with RadioTimes.com, Griselda director Andrés Baiz said the series hews close to reality. “We do all the research possible. We read books, we interview people, we watch documentaries — and once you have all this information, you’re then going to tell this story of someone,” Baiz explained. “But you need to ask yourself: as creators, what are we saying? What is the theme of our show? And the theme of our show is women in power, women in a man’s world. So then the writing and the directing is encompassed by that theme. So a lot of what you see in the show — a lot of characters, events, actions — are absolutely real, but we were most interested in our theme and the inner truth of those characters.”
Read on to see what’s fact and what’s fiction from the six-episode series.
Griselda, Streaming Now, Netflix
Is June Hawkins a real person?
In the show, June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez) is a police detective who pinpoints Griselda’s role in a trend of drug-related crimes in Miami. In real life, June Hawkins-Singleton is still alive — and married to fellow ex-detective Al Singleton (played by Carter MacIntyre in Griselda) — and she had a role in the show’s development, as showrunner Eric Newman revealed.
“We spent a fair amount of time with her; she was an invaluable consultant [and] resource,” Newman told RadioTimes.com. “She did have a very similar experience — obviously, with a very different ending.”
Is Carla a real person?
Colombian reggaeton singer Karol G recurs on Griselda as Carla, a sex worker who is one of Griselda’s friends and trafficking accomplices. As The Independent reports, however, Carla is a fictional addition to the narrative, an amalgamation of several women who reportedly abetted Blanco’s drug-smuggling operations.
Did Griselda Blanco kill her husbands?
Griselda viewers see the title character kill one husband, Alberto Bravo (Alberto Ammann, pictured here), and arrange the assassination of another, Darío Sepúlveda (Alberto Guerra).
The real-life Blanco allegedly killed both men — and she reportedly killed her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, too — according to Netflix’s Tudum blog. But Bravo’s death was the only direct killing detectives could attribute to Blanco, Hawkins-Singleton said. “I don’t doubt that she did a number of them perhaps, but we could never get anyone to either tell us that, or she certainly didn’t say anything about it,” the former detective told Tudum.
Whom else did Blanco kill?
Viewers see also Vergara’s version of Blanco shoot several characters dead, but the real-life Blanco was apparently responsible for many more murders than the show depicted. According to estimates cited by Tudum, Blanco is believed to have ordered more than 250 assassinations and to have been involved in 40 murders in Miami. In fact, she reportedly committed her first murder at age 11, kidnapping a 10-year-old boy from a wealthy Colombian family and killing him when his parents didn’t pay a ransom, according to VICE and Maxim.
Was Chucho’s toddler son killed?
In the show, Griselda orders a hit against her bodyguard Chucho Castro (Fredy Yate) after he doesn’t take the fall for a murder her son committed. Rivi (Martín Rodríguez), Griselda’s right-hand man, shoots into Chucho’s car and inadvertently kills the man’s two-year-old son.
Unfortunately, that happened in reality, too, per Vulture. Two-year-old Johnny Castro was slain in 1982, and Blanco was charged with first-degree murder for that crime in 1994, as the Tampa Bay Times reported at the time. Jorge “Rivi” Ayala pleaded guilty to that murder and two others in 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison, per TODAY.com.
Singleton told reporters that Blanco was gleeful that the boy died “because it would upset the father,” the Times added. But the murder case against her eventually fell apart because of a phone sex scandal involving Ayala.
Did Rivi undermine prosecutors’ case against Blanco by having phone sex?
This is another detail Griselda gets right. Ayala was going to be the prosecution’s star witness after Blanco was charged with the murders of Johnny Castro and two others. Then came the allegations that he had phone sex with secretaries from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.
“The State Attorney’s Office lost all credibility. Even though it was due to the secretary and not the prosecutor,” former West Miami police chief Nelson Andreu told TODAY.com.
After that scandal, Blanco took a plea deal and pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder, and she was sentenced to three concurrent 20-year sentences. In 2004, she was released and deported to Colombia, where she died in a 2012 drive-by shooting.
Did Blanco smuggle drugs in bras?
Not only did Blanco smuggle cocaine in bras, she also devoted a factory to the bra-smuggling operation, according to Tudum. “In the ’70s and ’80s, [it wasn’t] like it is now, where everyone’s going through a scanner or they’ll get a female attendant to search you,” Newman told the blog. “In those days, these guys were all customs guys, and there was no one who was stopping a beautiful woman walking through with a bra full of cocaine. It was sort of genius.”
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