Miami Herald, 1982
Griselda Blanco isn’t your typical ‘stay at home mom.’ Standing just over 5 feet tall and wearing a zebra print pantsuit you might think she knows more about interior decorating than business acumen. But don’t talk to her about fashion sense or you might just find yourself getting your throat slashed then being cut up with a chainsaw before having your appendages assembled in a cardboard box and dumped on the side of the highway!
Here in Miami the thriving cocaine boom is bringing exciting new opportunities for women as well as men. Until now murder and drug dealing have typically been male dominated business fields. But the next time you’re at a crowded shopping mall and you see two Latino men machine gunned over two hundred times in a liquor store, don’t be so quick to assume that that isn’t women’s work! And Ms. Blanco has a message for some of the other drug lords out here, ‘take a seat fellas, it’s the gals’ turn!’
Known as the “godmother of cocaine”, Griselda Blanco first moved to our beautiful state after she fled New York following her indictment on federal drug conspiracy charges. Today she remains a fugitive but I was able to track her down after I told her I wanted to profile her for my ‘women in business’ series and to buy several thousand dollars worth of cocaine. When I asked her about gender roles she had this to say:
“Today our media tells little girls that they should play with Barbies, that they can’t grow up to achieve what I have achieved. I want every girl to know that they too can be a blood thirsty billionaire living in a secluded mansion and suffering from extreme cocaine paranoia.”
And she’s not exaggerating her networth gentlemen, her narcotics trafficking organization rakes in over $80 million a month! Talk about the kind of weight women should really be concerned about! And Blanco has shown that just because she’s a gal doesn’t mean she’s afraid to get her hands just as dirty as the boys do. In fact she has pioneered a dynamic new retaliatory measure of killing not just her rivals, but their entire families and children too, even when they’re as young as 3 years old.
“I kill the babies so they take me seriously as a woman. And because Yahweh commands it.” She said while freebasing.
Today Ms. Blanco joins thousands of women who are empowering their gender by succeeding in other formerly male dominated fields such as environmental destruction and political corruption. As Gloria Steinem said “power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”
These brave women who make money at the expense of society are showing us every day that there really is no difference between the genders after all.