Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

That old story of Griselda, for example, the most ruthless female narco of all the Colombian drug traffickers. As a child she learned that all men are means, tools to manipulate so as to reach your goals. A reasonable theory if you grow up with a mother who got pregnant by a half-Indian guajiro landowner called Señor Blanco, who threw her out on the street as soon as the baby was born. An alcoholic, poor, abused, and desperate, Griselda’s mother dragged her daughter through the putrid streets of Medellín, forcing her to beg. A couple of miserable, human beggars who’d part ways only when the mother got herself pregnant by the umpteenth guy she’d picked up who knows where, only to join up later, now with the addition of a half brother or sister. These are the years of La Violencia in Colombia. Brutality is the order of the day, and if you want to survive, you have to be brutal too. Griselda turns thirteen, she starts to prostitute herself. The men she goes with are pieces of meat who vent themselves on her body, and who pay her just enough to get by till the next day. Her amber skin collects bruises and cuts, bites and scars. They don’t hurt, though; they’re just nicks on her thick armor. Men are a means. Nothing more. Griselda learns the art of pickpocketing to round out her income. She’s quick with her hands and doesn’t permit herself to steal from her clients, because she doesn’t want to risk ruining her beat. For her love is a foul-smelling bed she lies on, waiting while the sweaty creature on top of her does his duty. But one day she meets Carlos. Another man, one of many, and Griselda gives him the usual treatment: indifference. Carlos is a small-time criminal in Medellín, an expert pickpocket and thief who has a thriving partnership with a narco named Alberto Bravo. A long courtship begins between Griselda and Carlos. He brings her a different flower every day, which every day she throws away after accepting it with false courtesy. She never looks him in the eye, but he, unperturbed, makes the rounds of all the florists in Medellín, looking for different varieties. He teaches her a few tricks to make ends meet; she pretends not to listen but is actually memorizing everything he says. This skirmish lasts a long time, until Carlos’s stubborn perseverance breaks through, and Griselda surrenders. For the first time in her life a man has shown her that a relationship does not necessarily have to expire, that there exists a word she has never heard before: trust. They get married, they love each other, they make big plans. He introduces her to Alberto Bravo, who makes her see that the real money is in narco-trafficking. She is young but quick-witted, and doesn’t hesitate to set foot in that world. And besides, she has Carlos, who always says yes whenever she asks him if they will be together their whole lives. They move to New York, to Queens, where Colombians are starting to settle and the drug market is really flourishing. A new life. The city that never sleeps welcomes Griselda and Carlos like royalty. Things are going really well, and Carlos keeps saying yes whenever Griselda asks him: “Will we be together our whole lives?” Yes, yes, yes. But then Carlos gets sick — cirrhosis of the liver — and dies in the hospital. Griselda stays at his side till the end, and when her husband dies she doesn’t feel a thing, just as she used to feel nothing when she came home after a long night working and counted her new bites and scars in the mirror. Carlos didn’t honor their pact to stay together their whole lives; Carlos is just like every other man; men are a means.

She marries Alberto Bravo, but when he goes to Colombia on a work trip and she doesn’t hear from him for a while, a furious Griselda catches up with him and kills him in a shootout. By 1971 Griselda has her own narco-trafficking network in the United States. She has understood that the line connecting New York, Miami, and Colombia is the future. She has a lingerie shop in Medellín, where she sells her own designs, which she also has her mules wear. They’re the ones who hide 2 kilos of cocaine under their clothes on the Colombia — United States flight. Her name appears in the DEA files for the first time in 1973. She’s described as “a new threat for the United States.” Business is booming; she’s now one of the most important Colombian traffickers. Despite being a woman — no small handicap in a society where there’s no feminine version of the word “narco-trafficker”—Griselda proves to her Colombian colleagues that she can do the job and do it with such violence that she terrorizes people. Her reputation as a wicked woman without scruples precedes her everywhere she goes.

In 1975 she is accused of drug trafficking as part of an investigation in New York, but she manages to take refuge in Colombia. She has already amassed a fortune, $500 million. She returns to the United States a few years later, when things have calmed down, this time to Florida. She founds the Pistoleros, her own army of killers. Among them is Paco Sepúlveda, who slits his victims’ throats and then hangs them upside down until the blood has drained out: “The bodies are lighter that way, and it’s easier to move them.”

The stories about Griselda multiply: hypochondriac, druggie, bisexual, lover of orgies, paranoid, collector of luxury goods. Along with the rumors that feed the myth, Griselda starts collecting nicknames: Godmother, the Queen of Cocaine in Miami, the Black Widow. It’s rumored that she slit the throat of some men she’d gone to bed with. She gets married four times, always to narco-traffickers. Marriage is a lever for moving up in the hierarchy of power, and when a husband puts a spoke in her wheels, she has him eliminated. Like Dario Sepúlveda, who contests the custody agreement for their son, whom they named, of all things, Michael Corleone, and so she has him killed.

Griselda’s drug empire in Miami takes in $8 million a month. She plays a fundamental role in what will be called the Florida Cocaine War, also known as the Cocaine Cowboys War. Miami is flooded in money, estimated at about $10 billion a year.

In 1979 Griselda orchestrates the Dadeland Mall massacre. Two people are killed in a liquor store in that Dade County mall: Germán Jiménez Panesso, a Colombian drug trafficker who does business with Griselda’s organization, and who is the target of the shootout, and his bodyguard. In the 1970s homicides were a private matter. Sure, there were tortures, stranglings, mutilations, decapitations. But they were ways to settle the score. The Dadeland massacre signals instead the beginning of a long series of shootouts in Miami, of battles fought in public places, in the light of day. So-called collateral damage doesn’t matter anymore. Now people are shot in the street, in shopping malls, stores, restaurants, crowded locales at the busiest times of day. It is said that Griselda is responsible for the majority of murders committed in southern Florida during that time.

Griselda’s ruthlessness reaches epic proportions. Numerous episodes, told as if part of a legend, are passed from one person to the next.

Griselda walks into a bar just for men. Girls are dancing provocatively on their platforms. All heads turn to look at her. A woman who comes into a place like this? Unheard of. What’s more, a woman who looks like that: stoned, slovenly, haunted eyes. She sits down, orders a drink, observes the gyrating bodies. She seems about to touch those long legs. Then all of a sudden she gets up and fires a gun. One by one the girls fall to the ground. “Whores!” she screams. “Whores! All you know how to do is wiggle your asses for the men.” Griselda is obsessed with those women. For her they don’t deserve to live. Another obsession is hunting in bars. She liked to choose her men, and if they didn’t go along, they were dead. One time a kid, younger than her, sitting a few tables away, attracts her attention. Griselda wants him and fixes her eyes on him. He avoids her gaze, but Griselda insists. So the kid heads to the bathroom, and she follows, going into the women’s room. “Help!” she starts screaming. “Help!” and the kid comes running; maybe that weird woman is sick. Griselda is waiting for him, naked from the waist down. “Lick me,” she commands. The kid steps away, his back to the door, but Griselda takes out a pistol and repeats, “lick me.” So he does, the barrel of her gun glued to his head.