Here's What Happened To The Bodies Of These Drug Lords

On a list with mostly men, Griselda Blanco might be the most sadistic and vicious drug lord of all. She killed at least one, and possibly all three of her husbands, along with up to 200 other murders as she became the biggest cocaine trafficker in Miami during the 1970s and '80s.

Blanco was deported from the U.S. in 2004 after 15 years in prison, and returned to Colombia for a sort of semi-anonymous semi-retirement. But her many enemies didn't forget. In 2012, the 69-year-old was picking up what El Pais notes was a surprisingly large amount of meat from a local butcher. While she waited for her order, a man in a motorcycle helmet entered the store and shot her twice in the head. Ironically, drive-by motorcycle assassinations were a technique she pioneered in the drug trade. "It's some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others," University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley, author of the book "Drug Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Violence in the Americas Today," told the Guardian.

Two days later, Blanco was buried in the Cementerio Jardins Montesacro in Itagüí, Colombia, the same location as her biggest drug cartel rival (more on him later). Busloads of children were brought in for the funeral, while (hopefully adult) mourners shared bottles of liquor. One missing mourner was her son Michael, who was under house arrest for drug crimes in the U.S., per the Miami New Times.

If you have only heard of one drug lord, it will be Pablo Escobar. The Colombia kingpin was infamous in his lifetime and has only become more so through the books, films, and other media covering his life and violent death. GQ reports that Escobar's cartel was responsible for 80% of the cocaine that made it into the United States at one point. He had a truly staggering fortune, using it to buy, among other things, "cocaine hippos" that are still causing havoc in Colombia today.

Escobar was killed in a shootout with police in 1993, the New York Times reported. His funeral was an "insane circus," per the New York Daily News. The New York Times described it as a "rancorous mob." Mourners trying to get into the church broke the windows and then crawled over glass to touch the silver coffin. Eventually, they picked it up and carried it to the graveyard. Many locals saw him not as a violent drug lord but as a generous and charitable man. "He built houses and cared about the poor," one young mourner said. "In the future, people will go to his tomb to pray, the way they would to a saint."

That tomb is really a simple, flat stone in the Cementerio Jardins Montesacro in Itagüí, Colombia, the same location his drug trade competition Griselda Blanco is buried. Visitors still come by the thousands, some proudly doing cocaine off his gravestone and posting the images and videos online, per Atlas Obscura and the Independent. In 2006, Escobar's body was exhumed for DNA testing by his family, to prove he hadn't faked his death.

During his career as a drug trafficker, according to the Washington Post, Amado Carrillo Fuentes led a multi-billion-dollar operation, making him one of the richest guys in Mexico, and one of the world's most powerful drug lords. This is where you probably expect to learn he went out in a hail of bullets, cut down by police like so many others in his profession. The truth is far weirder: he died in 1997 while getting plastic surgery.

Fuentes' funeral was swarming with cops and the military, who took photos of mourners and even frisked some. The family was not happy. "He always said they'd never take him alive," his sister Alicia said. "Now that he's dead, they've come for him." But the kind of men the authorities were probably expecting to find at the funeral weren't there, with the mourners mostly being made up of local farm workers.

Fuentes was buried in Culiacán's Panteón Jardines del Humaya. British tabloid The Sun reports his half-million-dollar mausoleum includes a 50-seat chapel. Of course, if you believe the conspiracy theories, it's not the drug lord who is laid to rest in such opulence, but one of his subordinates, with the plastic surgery that "killed" Fuentes really performed on a cartel henchman to make him look like the drug lord. This man, the theory goes, was then murdered and passed off as his boss. Adding to the mystery, the three surgeons working on Fuentes (or whomever it was) when he died were all found dead in barrels of concrete only a few months later, per the Washington Post.

The British tabloid The Sun notes that Mexican drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva was best known for "his huge wealth." Still, at some point, even money can't protect those in that dangerous profession. The man who smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. and earned the nicknames "The Boss of Bosses" and  "The Beard," according to Reuters, eventually had his luck run out. He was killed by Mexican forces in a raid in 2009.

Despite a commercial-size airliner being hired to fly his body back to his home in Culiacán from Mexico City, Beltrán Leyva's funeral was small by drug lord standards. No men attended the service at Panteón Jardines del Humaya cemetery, for fear of being arrested, and the funeral was far from the "raucous" event the locals had expected. However, his mausoleum was anything but subdued. The Sun reports that the 2-story building is more like a mansion, complete with "Wi-Fi, satellite TV, air con, two bedrooms, and [a] kitchen." Reuters notes that these kinds of tombs are also usually "full of photos, plastic flowers, balloons, replica guns, and model cars."

There is a tragic postscript to Beltrán Leyva's story: the raid that took out him and six of his men had another casualty, a young Mexican Marine. The man was buried a week later as a national hero, according to NPR, but just hours after his grieving family returned home from his funeral, they were murdered in their home, a revenge killing by Beltrán Leyva's cartel.

At least one drug lord managed to fake his death, so you can imagine that this is something authorities have to watch out for. Their job was made especially difficult in this area when it came to Ramón Arellano Félix. The Mexican drug lord had the distinction, such as it were, of appearing next to Osama bin Laden on the FBI's Most Wanted List from 2001-2002, per the BBC.

But bin Laden would manage to hide from the law almost a decade longer than Félix. In 2002, Félix, despite being in charge of the Tijuana Cartel, decided to micromanage the murder of one of his rivals, traveling with some of his cartel members to do the killing. However, before he got the chance to take out the fellow drug lord, he ran into the cops, who took Félix himself out.

Or rather, it was a guy they are pretty sure was Félix. One of the two men whom the police killed in a shootout was carrying ID that said he was "Jorge Pérez Lopez." However, he was in possession of a gun that had killed two judges and for various other reasons was identified as Félix. Since he was dead, the authorities should have had plenty of time to make sure. But then someone claiming to be a relative picked up the body at the funeral home and immediately had it cremated. However, after DNA testing blood from the man's clothes, authorities said they were "virtually certain" the dead man was the drug lord, according to the New York Times.

José Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha was another drug lord who was seen as charitable by those in his hometown, in this case Pacho, Colombia. The New York Times says that he paid to renovate buildings in the town, but he made that money as the No. 2 guy in the Medellin cartel.

Rodriguez Gacha was killed along with his son and five of his bodyguards in a shootout with police in 1989, and all seven were quickly buried in a mass grave, before being exhumed two days later and returned home. There, anywhere from 3,000-15,000 mourners paraded through the streets, although the funeral itself was limited to family only. His remains were interred in the local cemetery in a "luxurious" wooden coffin, per the AP.

Or was he? Two years after his death, the Chicago Tribune spoke to residents of the town and a lot of them seemed pretty sure the drug lord was still alive and had faked his death. He was even said to have gotten in better shape and attended his own birthday party. The paper explained that even those who claimed not to believe the conspiracy theory said so "with a pinch of doubt and much fear." "They never showed his face on television when he died," the head of the local hospital, Dr. Antonio Ramirez said. "The funeral was held at night, and the coffin was closed. That`s not done in Colombia. It`s possible they buried somebody else in his grave."