Local 10 recently traveled to the winding streets of Medellin, Colombia, into barrio Antioquia, where a young Griselda Blanco was coming of age decades ago.

When Nelson Andreu, the retired chief of the West Miami Police Department, was a Metro-Dade detective, he thought of Griselda Blanco as a serial killer.

When an assassin in Miami-Dade killed Oscar Piedrahita — who had allegedly betrayed Colombian cocaine trafficker Griselda Blanco — he used a submachine gun. The hitman put more bullets in Piedrahita’s garage door than he put in him.

War followed Griselda Blanco. She was born in Colombia’s Caribbean region of Cartagena-Santa Marta where the use of violence over agrarian disputes and smuggling highly dictated bipartisan politics.

In northern Bogotá, Colombia, in a posh neighborhood, a woman clad in soft beige walked in high heels out of a two-story house with armed guards to investigate who was spying on her in the 1980s. Detectives identified her as Veronica Rivera de Vargas, better known as Bogotá's “Queen of Cocaine.”