Griselda Is More Copaganda Depicting Latines As Criminals, But With a Woman

I started watching Netflix’s Griselda with a healthy amount of scepticism. Following the success of Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, Griselda, featuring Colombian actor Sofía Vergara in the title role, is the streaming giant’s latest attempt to recreate the earlier triumph of its exclusive 2010s productions.

The duo behind Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, Eric Newman and Doug Miro, created and executive produced the six-episode limited series about Griselda Blanco, a Colombian woman who had a major impact on international drug trafficking. When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, creators Newman and Miro described Griselda as a “cousin” to their earlier shows. While this might assure viewers that they are in for some good television, this information gave me pause because both Narcos and Narcos: Mexico were powerful vessels to reinforce negative Latine stereotypes, particularly when it came to the men, whom the shows reduced to violent, corrupt, and money-hungry characters. As it turns out, I was right to be wary, as Griselda continues to stereotype Latines as violent criminals.

There’s no denying that Griselda Blanco was a pioneer in her field, a trailblazer of sorts in the international drug trafficking industry. By the 1970s, she and her second husband, Alberto Bravo, lived in New York City, where they smuggled drugs from Colombia. Credited with inventing drug smuggling and drive-by shootings, Blanco supposedly had a hand in hundreds of murders. Her story is truly fascinating — allegedly, she was the only woman Pablo Escobar ever feared — but Griselda fails to tell it in an interesting way, often relying on old drug baron stereotypes and a confused gender politic that refuses to divorce itself from Vergara’s reputation as a sex symbol. 

This new retelling starts in Miami after Blanco escapes Colombia and her husband Alberto, who she accuses of debasing her. In the show, Blanco’s husband forced her to have sex with her brother-in-law, a gross violation of trust and Blanco’s bodily autonomy, so Alberto could pay off a debt. While I am not married to interpretations of real-life figures being true to historical facts, I could not find any sources online to confirm this story or the motivation behind Blanco’s move to Miami. While the real Blanco was a survivor of sexual violence by her stepdad as a child and no doubt of violence against women throughout her life, this shocking start to her story on a huge streaming platform feels egregious. Kicking off a limited series about a woman drug lord with such a violent betrayal while implying she is vulnerable because of her gender feels like a misunderstanding of Blanco’s story. 

Blanco was a cruel and paranoid woman who was largely responsible for the bloody years of violence in Miami between 1970 and the early 1980s during the Cocaine Cowboys era. But in this version of the story, she was also a woman entrepreneur trying to make it in the male-dominated drug trafficking industry, which made her extra brutal when enforcing her authority. Alberto’s violation could have been interesting if it wasn’t so obvious that they got rid of him early on to construct a strange girlboss narrative that doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t quite protect Griselda from constant sexualisation. It feels like the showrunners want it both ways: They want Griselda to be scary and also constantly vulnerable to sexual violence. 

This is apparent in episode two of the series when several men threaten Griselda with sexual assault. After proving herself through brutality and murder, Blanco decides the only way to ensure her safety is to be twice as murderous as the men in the industry. Vergara delivers a good performance, but it feels unfair that there’s so much emphasis on violently sexualising the character she is playing. The constant threat of sexual violence, along with the idea that her male drug baron counterparts see her as a weak opponent, works to justify Griselda’s violence. But I can’t help but think that this recasts her as a victim, as if she were forced to kill the hundreds of people she killed just to prove or protect herself. We should hold women who do bad things accountable for their actions, and the defense presented doesn’t quite work when we all know that drug trafficking is about making large sums of money. It’s evident that Vergara has the range to perform without falling back on what men think her body could bring to the character — unfortunately, this project isn’t where she gets to flaunt these performance skills.

The show’s insistence on a gender narrative — which I am convinced even the showrunners didn’t understand — is essentially what makes it unappealing and, ultimately, contrived. For example, when Blanco tries to persuade the Cuban Marielitos to join her drug trafficking scheme, she draws on her powerlessness as a woman and proclaims she has surpassed the trappings of her gender with entrepreneurship and grit. She has proved she can play with the big boys so the Marielitos can trust her. 

Not only is this a bizarre narrative to spin about a murderous drug trafficker who is responsible for hundreds of deaths, but it also feels dated and forced, as though the writers thought they should incorporate Feminism 101 into their storyline as an unsatisfactory nod to Blanco’s gender. There’s a reluctance to even consider that Blanco was violent because she came from poverty, suffered sexual abuse as a child, and had to fend for herself from a very early age through sex work. Instead, the show insists that she was violent because she was proving herself to her male competition. Because of this confused gender narrative, Griselda felt like an underdeveloped character, like they had simply written a female Pablo Escobar. It really didn’t work. 

Griselda also resurfaces a question I always think is worth asking: Do we need another TV show or film depicting Latines as power-hungry drug traffickers? Do we need another series that bypasses and ignores U.S. interests in continuing to fight the ineffective war on drugs? Do we need another show about the war on drugs that is so obviously copaganda? Even when the main character is a woman who can conquer power, Latine people are still being stereotyped as violent, cruel, and ultimately corrupted. The conclusion hasn’t changed, despite meek attempts at introducing gendered representation. Perhaps almost a decade ago, when Narcos first dropped, this kind of storytelling was innovative and told an old story in a new way. But in 2024, the Narcos-style, sepia-toned cinematography, along with its unchanging ideas around Latines and gender, feels painfully dated.