Colombian co-operation with US and UK leads to capture of Gulf Clan drug baron
Colombia’s most-wanted drug trafficker was arrested near the border with Panama and paraded in handcuffs in front of soldiers and photographers.
Dairo Antonio Usuga, alias Otoniel, headed the country’s largest drug-trafficking gang, known as the Gulf Clan.
He was captured near one of his main outposts in Necocli, about 800 kilometres northwest of the Colombian capital, Bogota.
“This is the hardest strike to drug trafficking in our country this century,” President Ivan Duque said on Saturday.
He said the arrest was “only comparable to the fall of Pablo Escobar”, the narco-trafficker who founded the Medellin Cartel in 1976 and was shot and killed by the Colombian National Police in December 1993.
About 500 soldiers and 22 helicopters were sent to Necocli to carry out the operation, in which one police officer died.
It was “the biggest penetration of the jungle ever seen
in the military history of our country”, Mr Duque said.
Colombia’s police chief Jorge Vargas said that the authorities carried out “an important satellite operation with agencies of the US and the UK”.
According to police, Otoniel was hiding in the jungle in the Uraba region, where he grew up, and did not use a telephone, relying on couriers to communicate. Fearful of authorities, he “slept there in the rain, never approaching inhabited areas”, Mr Vargas said.
The US offered a $5 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of Otoniel. He was charged in the US in 2009 and now faces extradition proceedings to appear in the Southern District of New York federal court.
The Colombian government blames the Gulf Clan, financed mainly through drug trafficking, illegal mining and extortion, for being one of the main causes of the worst bout of nationwide violence since the signing of a peace pact with Farc guerrillas in 2016.
The Gulf Clan is present in almost 300 municipalities in the country, according to the independent think tank Indepaz.
However, government efforts have caused heavy damage to the organisation.
Although Otoniel announced in 2017 that he intended to reach an agreement to co-operate with the Colombian justice system, the government responded by sending at least 1,000 soldiers after him.
He assumed leadership of the Gulf Clan, previously known as the Usuga Clan, from his brother Juan de Dios, who was killed by police in 2012.