One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a key operator of the Medellin cartel has been deported back to the South American nation, after serving 25 years of a 30-year jail sentence within the United States.
A short time later, Fabio Ochoa was once more a free man.
Ochoa arrived at Bogota’s El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday, sporting a gray sweatshirt and carrying his private belongings in a plastic bag. After stepping out of the aircraft, the previous cartel boss was met by immigration officers in bulletproof vests. There have been no police on website to detain him.
Fernando Vergara / AP
Colombia’s nationwide immigration company promptly posted a quick assertion on the social media platform X, saying Ochoa was “freed in order that he may be a part of his household” after immigration officers took his fingerprints and confirmed by a database that he’s not wished by Colombian authorities.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began flooding the U.S. within the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties, in response to U.S. authorities, to the purpose that in 1987 they have been included within the Forbes Magazine’s listing of billionaires.
Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution middle for the cocaine cartel as soon as headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellín in 1993.
Colombian Immigration by way of AP
Ochoa was first indicted within the U.S. for his alleged position within the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel however turned an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Along along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa turned himself in to Colombian authorities within the early Nineteen Nineties below a deal wherein they averted being extradited to the U.S.
The three brothers have been launched from jail in 1996, however Ochoa was arrested once more three years later for drug trafficking and was extradited to the U.S. in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami naming him and greater than 40 individuals as a part of a drug smuggling conspiracy.
He was the one suspect in that group who opted to go to trial, leading to his conviction and a 30-year sentence. The different defendants received a lot lighter jail phrases as a result of most of them cooperated with the federal government.
Ochoa’s title has light from widespread reminiscence as Mexican drug traffickers take middle stage within the world drug commerce.
Fernando Vergara / AP
But the previous member of the Medellin cartel was not too long ago depicted within the Netflix sequence Griselda, the place he first fights the plucky businesswoman Griselda Blanco for management of Miami’s cocaine market after which makes an alliance with the drug trafficker, performed by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa can also be depicted within the Netflix series Narcos, because the youngest son of an elite Medellin household that’s into ranching and horse breeding and cuts a pointy distinction with Escobar, who got here from extra humble roots.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. lawyer who was on the prosecution workforce that convicted Ochoa, stated authorities have been by no means in a position to seize all the Ochoa household’s illicit drug proceeds and he expects that the previous mafia boss can have a welcome return house.
“He will not be retiring a poor man, that is for positive,” Gregorie instructed The Associated Press earlier this month.
