One of many founders of the Medellin drug cartel has returned to Colombia after serving greater than 20 years in jail within the US for drug trafficking.
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, now 67 years outdated, was deported by the US authorities and landed in Bogota on Monday a free man.
Ochoa was one of many founding members of the infamous cartel and had been a senior lieutenant to notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The Medellin cartel dominated the cocaine commerce and waged a violent marketing campaign in opposition to the Colombian state earlier than Escobar was killed in 1993.
On his arrival in Bogota, immigration officers ran Ochoa’s fingerprints by means of their database, the nation’s immigration company mentioned.
Confirming that he’s not wished by Colombian authorities, it mentioned that Ochoa was freed “to be reunited along with his household”.
Amid a sea of reporters within the airport terminal, Ochoa was greeted by his family members and hugged his daughter.
In 2001, Ochoa was flown to the US after being arrested in Colombia in 1999 together with about 30 different alleged traffickers.
He had already served a jail sentence in Colombia within the early 90s for his position as certainly one of bosses of the Medellin cartel. Alongside along with his brothers, he was the primary main trafficker to give up beneath a programme that protected cartel members from extradition to the US in the event that they pleaded responsible to minor offences in Colombia.
Ochoa and his brothers have been launched from jail in 1996, however Ochoa was arrested as soon as once more through the so-called Millennium operation over his involvement within the cocaine smuggling enterprise within the US within the late Nineties.
In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to greater than 30 years in a US courtroom for his involvement within the cartel that introduced a median of 30 tonnes of cocaine into the US every month between 1997 and 1999.
In the course of the Eighties, he was one of many prime operators in Escobar’s Medellin ring, a provider in its prime of 80% of the US cocaine market.
The defunct Medellin cartel, together with the Cali cartel, was probably the most highly effective and feared drug networks of the Eighties.
Its violent campaigns of bombings and assassinations led to extraditions of medication suspects between Colombia and the US to be suspended, earlier than being resumed in 1997.
