Major Colombian Drug Cartel Leader Captured!

 

Out Goes the King

COLOMBIA

Colombian authorities captured Dairo Antonio Usuga, the country’s most-wanted drug trafficker, over the weekend in an arrest that has been likened to the operation that brought down notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar three decades ago, Al Jazeera reported.

Security forces detained the leader of the Gulf Clan – better known as Otoniel – in the rural area of the northern Uraba region.

President Ivan Duque said Otoniel’s capture “marks the end of the Gulf Clan,” adding that his government was working to extradite him to the United States.

The drug kingpin was first indicted in 2009 in a Manhattan federal court on drug trafficking charges. He also faces other criminal charges in the US, including the continuous operation of a criminal enterprise and the use of firearms in drug trafficking.

Authorities have been trying to capture Otoniel for years. Meanwhile, his capture comes as Colombia’s security forces are slowly losing hold of rural areas to armed gangs.

Human Rights Watch praised Otoniel’s arrest, saying that the leader “must be held accountable for the hundreds of crimes committed under his command.”

Even so, analysts and human rights advocates worry that Otoniel’s capture will leave a vacuum in the criminal organization, which will lead to in-fighting and more violence.

They noted how that occurred after the 1993 killing of Escobar and the 2016 capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the former leader of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.