Bogota: Colombian security forces have arrested the most sought-after drug traders in the country, a rural warlord that remains in the run for more than a decade by damaging state officials and aligning themselves with fighters on the left and right.
President Ivan Duque equalized Saturday’s arrest at Dairo Antonio Usuga to the arrest of three decades ago from Pablo Escobar.
The Colombian military presented the usugow to the media in the handcuffs and wore rubber shoes favored by rural farmers.
Usuga, better known by his alias Otoniel, is the alleged head of the bay clan that has been feared, whose killer forces have terrorized many North Colombia to get control over the main cocaine smuggling routes through the North Central Forest to Central America and to the US.
He had long been a fixture on the brave fugitive list of US drug enforcement drugs, which arrested him had offered a $ 5 million prize.
He was first charged with 2009, in the Federal Court of Manhattan, about narcotics allegations and for allegedly providing assistance to far paramilitary groups that set terrorist organizations by the US government.
Then the charges in Federal Purts Brooklyn and Miami accused him of importing US at least 73 metric tons of cocaine between 2003 and 2014 through countries including Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Honduras.
But as many armed people, he also cycled through the ranks of several guerrilla groups, who recently claimed to lead the self-defense troops from Colombia, after the midst of the 20th century Firebrand left Colombia.
The authorities said the intelligence provided by the US and Britain led more than 500 soldiers and members of the Special Forces of Colombia to the Usuga Forest Forest, which was protected by eight security rings.
Usuga for years flew under the authorities radar by avoiding high-known Colombian Narcos profiles.
He and his brother, who was killed in the attack in 2012, earned initially as a gunman for the left guerrilla group which is now no one known as a popular liberation army and then then turned to the side and joined the enemy Battlefield rebels, a right wing.
Paramilitary group.
He refused to disarm disarm when the militia signed a peace agreement with the government in 2006, instead of studying deeper from the Colombian world and establishing operations in the strategic bay of the Uraba region in North Colombia, the main drug corridor surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.
sea ​​on both sides.
Leaks and networks of rural safe houses suspected of moving in between every night allow them for years to fight the earth’s former campaign by the military against the bay clan.
When he opposed the authority, legend as a bandit grew beside the horror stories told by Colombian authorities from many underage women and their cohorts allegedly harassed sexually.
But the war took the victim at a 50-year-old fugitive, who even ran insisted on sleeping on an orthopedic mattress to relieve back injuries.
In 2017, he showed his face for the first time on the occasion of Pope Francis to the country, publishing a video where he asked his group to be allowed to put his gun and demobilized as part of the country’s peace process with a revolutionary armed force that was far greater than Colombia.
The arrest is something that is a boost for conservative duque, the law and rhetoric command is not suitable for soaring cocaine production.
The land dedicated to the production of coca _ raw material for cocaine _ jumped 16% last year to record 245,000 hectares, an invisible level in two decades of US eradicating efforts, according to the White House report.