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.
Colmbia President Ivan Duque likened the arrest of Usuga to the seize of Pablo Escobar three many years in the past. (Reuters)
Colombia’s army introduced 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 a lot feared Gulf Clan whose military of assassins has terrorised a lot of northern Colombia to achieve management of main cocaine smuggling routes by thick jungles north to Central America and onto the US.
He’s lengthy been a fixture on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s most wished fugitives listing for whose seize it had been providing a 5 million reward. He was first indicted in 2009 in Manhattan federal court docket on narcotics expenses and for allegedly offering help to a far proper paramilitary group designated a terrorist organisation by the US authorities. Later indictments in Brooklyn and Miami federal courts accused him of importing into the US at the very least 73 metric tons of cocaine between 2003 and 2014 by international locations together with Venezuela Guatemala Mexico Panama and Honduras.
But like a lot of his gunmen he’s additionally cycled by the ranks of a number of guerrilla teams most just lately claiming to steer the Gaitanist Self Defense Forces of Colombia after a mid-Twentieth century Colombian leftist firebrand.
Authorities stated intelligence supplied by the US and UK 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.
He and his brother, who was killed in a raid in 2012, acquired their begin as gunmen for the now defunct leftist guerrilla group often known as the Popular Liberation Army after which later switched sides and joined the rebels battlefield enemies, a proper wing paramilitary group.
He refused to disarm when that militia signed a peace treaty with the federal government in 2006, as an alternative delving deeper into Colombia’s felony underworld and organising operations within the strategic Gulf of Uraba area in northern Colombia, a serious 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 scorchedearth 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 instructed by Colombian authorities of the numerous underage girls he and his cohorts allegedly abused sexually.
But the struggle 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 occasionally of Pope Francis’ go to to the nation, publishing a video by which he requested for his group be allowed to put down its weapons and demobilise as a part of the nation’s peace course of with the a lot bigger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
His arrest is one thing of a lift for the conservative Duque who legislation 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 final yr to a report 245000 hectares a stage unseen in twenty years of US eradication efforts in accordance with a White House report.
