Colombian safety forces have captured the nation’s most wished drug trafficker, a rural warlord who stayed on the run for greater than a decade by corrupting state officers and aligning himself with combatants on the left and proper.
President Ivan Duque likened the arrest Saturday of Dairo Antonio Usuga to the seize three many years in the past of Pablo Escobar.
Colombia’s army offered Usuga to the media in handcuffs and carrying rubber boots most popular by rural farmers.
Usuga, higher identified by his alias Otoniel, is the alleged head of the much-feared Gulf Clan, whose military of assassins has terrorized a lot of northern Colombia to achieve management of main cocaine smuggling routes by way of thick jungles north to Central America and onto the U.S.
He is lengthy been a fixture on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted fugitives record, for whose seize it had been providing a $5-million US reward. He was first indicted in 2009, in Manhattan federal courtroom, on narcotics fees and for allegedly offering help to a far-right paramilitary group designated a terrorist group by the U.S. authorities.
Accused of smuggling large quantities of cocaine
Later indictments in Brooklyn and Miami federal courts accused him of importing into the U.S. a minimum of 73 tonnes of cocaine between 2003 and 2014 by way of nations together with Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Honduras.
However like lots of his gunmen, he is additionally cycled by way of the ranks of a number of guerrilla teams, most not too long ago claiming to guide the Gaitanist Self Defence Forces of Colombia, after a mid-Twentieth century Colombian leftist firebrand.
Authorities stated intelligence supplied by the U.S. and U.Okay. led greater than 500 troopers and members of Colombia’s particular forces to Usuga’s jungle hideout, which was protected by eight rings of safety.
Usuga for years flew underneath the radar of authorities by eschewing the excessive profile of Colombia’s higher identified narcos.
Brothers joined leftist guerrilla group
He and his brother, who was killed in a raid in 2012, bought their begin as gunmen for the now-defunct leftist guerrilla group often known as the Common Liberation Military after which later switched sides and joined the rebels’ battlefield enemies, a right-wing paramilitary group.
He refused to disarm when that militia signed a peace treaty with the federal government in 2006, as a substitute delving deeper into Colombia’s prison underworld and organising operations within the strategic Gulf of Uraba area in northern Colombia, a significant drug hall surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean sea on both aspect.
Leaks and a community of rural protected homes he supposedly moved amongst each night time allowed him for years to withstand a scorched-earth marketing campaign by the army in opposition to the Gulf Clan. As he defied authorities, his legend as a bandit grew alongside the horror tales informed by Colombian authorities of the numerous underage ladies he and his cohorts allegedly abused sexually.
Confirmed face throughout 2017 papal go to
However the conflict was taking its toll on the 50-year-old fugitive, who even whereas on the run insisted on sleeping on orthopedic mattresses to ease a again harm. In 2017, he confirmed his face for the primary time from time to time of Pope Francis’s go to to the nation in September 2017, publishing a video through which he requested for his group be allowed to put down its weapons and demobilize as a part of the nation’s peace course of with the much-larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
His arrest is one thing of a lift for the conservative Duque, whose law-and-order rhetoric has been no match for hovering manufacturing of cocaine.
Land devoted to the manufacturing of coca — the uncooked ingredient of cocaine — jumped 16 per cent final yr to a document 245,000 hectares, a degree unseen in 20 years of U.S. eradication efforts, based on a White Home report.