Qué Tengo Pa' Tí: Cocaine Cowboys

"Miami: a city that suffered the effects of the drug"

Cocaine Cowboys is a 2006 documentary film directed by Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben through their Miami-based media studio 'Rakontur'. The film explores the rise of cocaine and resulting crime epidemic that swept the American city of Miami, Florida in the 1970s and 1980s. The producers of Cocaine Cowboys use interviews with law enforcement, journalists, lawyers, former drugs smugglers, and gangs members to provide a first hand perspective of the Miami drug war.

Trailer

Cocaine Cowboys chronicles the development of the illegar drug trade in Miami during the 1970s and 1980s with interviews of both law enforcement and organized crime leaders, in addition to news footage from the era. The film reveals that in the 1960s and early 1970s, marijuana was the primary import drug into the region. During the 1970s, marijuana imports were replaced by the much more lucrative cocaine imports; as more cocaine was smuggled into the United States, the price dropped, allowing it to turn "blue collar," and be available to a wider market. Drug importers reveal several of the different methods used to import the drug into Florida.

The primary methods used to import the narcotics were by boat or by air. The drug importers also reveal the complexity of their methods of importation. The logistics involved with the importation included the purchase and financing of legitimate businesses to provide cover for illegal operations, the use of sophisticated electronic homing devices, and other elaborate transportation schemes. The film also discusses how importers sometimes had difficulty storing all the money they made, resulting in them setting up a relationship with Noriega in Panama, as well as buying up entire neighborhoods of houses, putting money into infrastructure, as well as side projects, such as race horses.

The distribution networks were also highly elaborate, and many people were involved locally and nationally in the consumption of the imported cocaine. Importers reveal that condominiums were purchased near particular ocean waterways to provide a monitoring post for Coast Guard and local police patrol boats. Importers reveal the use of high-tech radio monitoring equipment used to monitor the radio frequencies of Federal, State, and local authorities in order to warn incoming boats and airplanes.

The film reveals that much of the economic growth which took place in Miami during this time period was a benefit of the drug trade. As members of the drug trade made immense amounts of money, this money flowed in large amounts into legitimate businesses. As a result, drug money indirectly financed the construction of many of the modern high-rise buildings in southern Florida. Later, when law enforcement pressure drove many major players out of the picture, many high-end stores and businesses closed because of plummeting sales.

Also documented in the film is the gangland violence associated with the trade. The interviewees in the film argue that Griselda Blanco, an infamous crime family matriarch, played a major role in the history of the drug trade in Miami and other cities across America. It was the lawless and corrupt atmosphere, primarily from Blanco's operations, that led to the gangsters' being dubbed the "Cocaine Cowboys".

Griselda Blanco

"The Godmother"

Who Is She ?

Griselda Blanco was born on February 15, 1943, in a slum of Santa Marta, Magdalena, a city located on the Atlantic coast of Colombia. His mother became pregnant being raised from his boss, Mr. White, and was expelled from the estate. Later, Ana Lucia Restrepo, as it was called, was dedicated to prostitution, and the family moved to Medellín when Griselda was three years old. In the documentary "Cocaine Cowboys (Part Two)": Hustlin with the Godmother Blanco's former lover, Charles Cosby, recounts how she, with only 11 years, together with a group of children and adolescents marginal Medellin, kidnapped a child and upper class to take the child's parents negotiate the ransom kidnapped, White finally shot him dead on the spot.

With his fellow teens, White had become a pickpocket. At the age of 14 he ran away from his mother's side being physically assaulted her, resorting to prostitution to age 20 years in the city of Medellin. She married Jose Dario Trujillo, who was her first husband and they had three children: Dixon, Uber Sneider, and Osvaldo.

Her second husband was Dario Sepulveda, who had their fourth child, Michael Corleone Sepúlveda.

In the 1970s, White and her third husband, Alberto Bravo, emigrated to the United States, established the city of Queens, New York, Establishing a major cocaine business in that place. In April 1975, White was indicted on federal charges of drug conspiracy, along with 30 of his subordinates, at that time the biggest cocaine case in history. White fled to Colombia before he could be stopped, but in late 1970 he returned to Miami.

Griselda Blanco is known for participating in drug-related violence known as the Cocaine Cowboy Wars that hit Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when cocaine was supplanted by marijuana.

In 1984, Griselda Blanco will to use violence against its competitors in Miami, or anyone who displeased him, led his rivals to make repeated attempts to kill her. Because of this he moved to California to escape the assassination attempts against it. The February 20, 1985, was arrested by DEA agents at home. Detained without bail, Griselda Blanco was sentenced to more than a decade in prison. She continued to run her cocaine business in prison. Pressing one of his lieutenants, the Office of Miami-Dade County State Attorney obtained enough evidence to charge her with three murders.

However, the case collapsed, largely due to technicalities and Griselda Blanco was released and deported to Colombia in 2004. Before his death in 2012, was last seen in the "El Dorado International Airport". It was called the "Black Widow", in reference to the female insect called 'latrodectus' that, after mating, kills and devours the male, referring to the killing of those who were their husbands.

Griselda Blanco was killed on September 3, 2012 by two gunmen on a motorcycle as he left a carnage in the Bethlehem neighborhood in Medellin. It was reported that he fired two bullets in the head. Presumably for the past reckoning.

Cuban Involvement

Cocaine Cowboys is a documentary film directed by Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman, that no resident of South Florida to be missed, but should not be missed especially Cubans. The documentary explores the bloody war between drug riders in the seventies and eighties of the previous century in Miami, through interviews with journalists, politicians, police, lawyers, prosecutors, drug dealers and hit men posters, all participants from their disparate angles and occupations, in the events described.

From the sequences of the film leaves the reality of a Miami to a dark and bright, unusual site, a city that many did not know and that many more prefer to forget. A lurid and bloody, like those of all foundation myths, which placed the once sleepy city on the map of the world and endowed it for good and bad of an indelible identity.

But at the beginning said that it is a film that should not be missed especially the islanders and that it inadvertently made by land at least two of the handiest myths, these foundational if not propaganda, about Cuban Miami. The first talk of traffic control for large and ruthless drug lords Cubans, as the anthology film recreates Brian De Palma's Scarface / Oliver Stone, starring Al Pacino, Steven Bauer and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the truth is showing Cocaine Cowboys another island national ego and the floor crying, because not one of the hard and flagship gunmen, kingpins and drug transporters would be Cuban, American and Colombian unless under the aegis of the Ochoa family of Medellin, not that assassins had not, lords and drug transporters Cubans, who had and good, but none even come close to the excellence of the appeared in the documentary, much less to the excellence of marielito named.

In fact, the only Cuban fairly high on "Cocaine Cowboys (Part One)", is a black psychopath, just arrived from the Mariel boatlift, which paid a brutal Colombian drug baroness, known for the Godmother, bayonet kills a bonnet, another Colombian , no less than in the Miami Airport Customs full afternoon, and before the astonished and frightened eyes of the world, poor devil without class, as he defines a former American officer of the DEA as compared with another assassin originally of Colombia, but raised in Chicago.

Not that the Cubans, mostly 'marielitos', not dying and killing in this war for control of white dust, is that they are in addition, mostly as thugs row, a butcher who has started long before disembarking them Key West. The first major shooting war that takes place on July 11, 1979 in the 'Dadeland Mall' in Miami and Mariel refugees first arrive in Miami on April 23, 1980. That is, nine months after the carnage of the 'Dadeland Mall'.