R.I.P: 5 Latino Celebs We Lost in 2012

Griselda Blanco

Before her death this year at the age of 69, Griselda Blanco lived the kind of life that many might liken to a Hollywood film. She may be better recognized by one of her many aliases, The Cocaine Godmother, after the widespread cocaine drug trade she piloted throughout the United States and her home country of Colombia. Notorious in the 1970s and 1980s for her substantial cocaine business in Queens, New York, and drug-related brutality in Miami known as the Cocaine Cowboy Wars, Blanco spent time in and out of jail before finally being deported back to Colombia in 2004. On September 3, 2012, on her way out of a butcher shop in Medellín, Colombia, the city where she grew up, she was shot twice in the head in a motorcycle assassination.