Leaks and a network of rural safe houses he supposedly moved among every night allowed him for years to resist a scorched-earth campaign by the military against the Gulf Clan. He refused to disarm when that militia signed a peace treaty with the government in 2006, instead delving deeper into Colombia's criminal underworld and setting up operations in the strategic Gulf of Uraba region in northern Colombia, a major drug corridor surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean sea on either side. He and his brother, who was killed in a raid in 2012, got their start as gunmen for the now-defunct leftist guerrilla group known as the Popular Liberation Army and then later switched sides and joined the rebels' battlefield enemies, a right-wing paramilitary group. Úsuga for years flew under the radar of authorities by eschewing the high profile of Colombia's better known narcos. led more than 500 soldiers and members of Colombia's special forces to Úsuga's jungle hideout, which was protected by an eight rings of security. at least 73 metric tons of cocaine between 20 through countries including Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Honduras.īut like many of his gunmen, he's also cycled through the ranks of several guerrilla groups, most recently claiming to lead the Gaitanist Self Defense Forces of Colombia, after a mid-20th century Colombian leftist firebrand.Īuthorities said intelligence provided by the U.S. Later indictments in Brooklyn and Miami federal courts accused him of importing into the U.S. He was first indicted in 2009, in Manhattan federal court, on narcotics charges and for allegedly providing assistance to a far-right paramilitary group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's most-wanted fugitives list, for whose capture it had been offering a $5 million reward. Úsuga, better known by his alias Otoniel, is the alleged head of the much-feared Gulf Clan, whose army of assassins has terrorized much of northern Colombia to gain control of major cocaine smuggling routes through thick jungles north to Central America and onto the U.S.

President Iván Duque likened the arrest Saturday of Dairo Antonio Úsuga to the capture three decades ago of Pablo Escobar.Ĭolombia's military presented Úsuga to the media in handcuffs and wearing rubber boots preferred by rural farmers. BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian security forces have captured the country's most wanted drug trafficker, a rural warlord who stayed on the run for more than a decade by corrupting state officials and aligning himself with combatants on the left and right.

Pablo escobar the drug lord online hd