As a Colombian, watching shows like “Narcos,” “Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal,” or “La Viuda Negra” has always left me with a sense of conflict — conflict between thinking: los muertos no hablan (the dead do not speak) and who am I to dictate if this story should be told by the entertainment media or not?
There’s a sense of tiredness, of thinking we’ve had more than enough films and telenovelas about such a terrifying, violent and heartbreaking time in Colombian and Latin American history. Even more than that, we’ve had enough productions glorifying these drug lords who left too many victims in the wake of their power, too much death and even more devastated families.
When I saw that another production was coming about Griselda Blanco’s life on Netflix, it was like a punch to the gut. As a Colombian living in the U.S., I’ve heard too many times the questions about drug trafficking in my land, the references to Pablo Escobar and the violence left from the war against drugs in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as a woman, even more comments about the fetishizing of Colombian women this violent era left behind.
The rise and glamorizing of prostitution and the idea of Colombian women for “narcos” as a sign of status and power left the new generations dealing with a stereotype of Colombian women whose worth is decided by their bodies and beauty.
A production like this feels like a reminder that the international world encapsulates Colombians as only the most painful part of their history.
In Netflix’s “Griselda,” there’s not much I can criticize on a production level: Sofia Vergara’s acting was incredible and takes her out of the Latina bombshell stereotype her award-winning role in “Modern Family” had trapped her in. “Griselda” gave Vergara the opportunity to showcase her abilities in ways her audience has been dying to see.
The trope of the underdog featuring Griselda Blanco at the beginning running away from Medellin to Miami to escape an abusive marriage that left her with a bullet wound was effectively portrayed.
The struggles with the sexism of the era were executed flawlessly by both her struggle to get the other drug lords to take her seriously as well as her counterpart’s character arc developed by detective June Hawkins, portrayed by actress Juliana Aidén Martinez, trying to get the police department to recognize a woman is the one causing the violent drug war. These are parts of the drug dealing narrative that are overlooked when they are told through the lenses of men like Pablo Escobar and Scarface.
Even more outside the canon is the fact that this woman’s nickname is La tia and La Madrina because her character is very layered — she’s not only a ruthless and cold-blooded drug lord like Pablo Escobar and Scarface have been portrayed at times, but she is also a loving mother (if questionable and neglectful towards the end), a friend and maternal figure to all those who work for her and the woman helping other women leave prostitution, earn their own money and learn to fend for themselves.
Her story seems almost empowering in the first couple of episodes and taps into the darkest side of feminine rage that most women can understand: the want to make a name for themselves, to be the most powerful person in the room and to demand respect instead of almost begging for it.
This sense of sisterhood is almost called forward from the moment Pablo Escobar says, “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.”
How could such an evil man be scared? And of a woman nevertheless?
But it is this glorification and this demonization of a historical figure that causes controversy. In the words of Jose Guarnizo, a Colombian journalist whose investigations about Griselda Blanco’s life inspired the Netflix show, to the organization Mutante: “She departs from the canon because she was a woman, but she was a woman who, in the end, let herself be carried away by something that has nothing to do with being a man or a woman, but with the human condition: ambition, letting herself be moved by easy money, for many millions of dollars after coming from a very poor neighborhood.”
She was a woman that, at the end of the day, did not rise in the drug trafficking industry for her children as her character often repeats in the six-episode show, neither was she innocent of destroying lives, even as collateral damage, as was the case of Johnny Castro. She was a woman who, as portrayed in some of the scenes with los Marielitos, would take people in vulnerable positions of poverty, marginalization and exile, among others, and sell them the “American Dream” of respect and ideology.
She would give them a way to provide for their families and something to die for, earning her nicknames like La compasiva –the compassionate. Seems like an ironic glorification for a woman who, by the end of the series, would turn into a paranoid bloodthirsty person who would order even the death of her new husband and the death of a witness’ baby.
And that’s the part the show doesn’t tell. Guarnizo told Mutante that “when you start to see that drug trafficking left a lot of real victims and then that becomes entertainment, there is something that doesn’t add up.”
The show doesn’t tell you that almost fifty years later, Colombian and Latin American culture hasn’t recovered from the real-life impacts this history has left. It doesn’t tell you that during the time of Griselda Blanco and Pablo Escobar, people were scared of seeing cars parked too long in the streets, thinking the cars could have bombs and could explode any minute, regardless of whether they were parked in front of a school, a club or a government building. People were scared of talking about who in the neighborhood could belong to a drug trafficking group, because even if they knew who they were, and even when they didn’t belong to that violence, talking could get them or their families tortured and killed.
It doesn’t tell you what happened with the families of the victims it left or how they never recovered or had to run away.
The show doesn’t tell you that her abuse of Cuban exiles in the wake of her power in the United States still contributes to immigrant stereotypes of criminals and killers against families who are looking for a better life.
It doesn’t tell you that almost fifty years later, I still have people fetishize my womanhood because of where I come from. It doesn’t tell you that Colombians are still ostracized as violent and criminal people. It doesn’t tell you that even if the media is allowed to tell these stories, and some people want them told, for others this representation in entertainment is a perpetualization of the violence they suffered.
It makes them a victim all over again.
And you can say they won because they survived and Griselda Blanco was killed in 2012.
But how would it feel to have your wound broken open for everyone to see every time someone sees a profitable story in your abuser?