One of the founders of the Medellin drug cartel has returned to Colombia after serving more than 20 years in a US prison for drug trafficking.
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, now 67 years old, was deported by the US government and arrived in Bogota on Monday a free man.
Ochoa was one of the founders of the notorious cartel and was a former top lieutenant of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The Medellin cartel controlled the cocaine trade and waged a violent campaign against the Colombian state before Escobar was assassinated in 1993.
When he arrived in Bogota, immigration officials used Ochoa’s fingerprints in their database, said the immigration agency.
Confirming that he is not wanted by the Colombian authorities, it said that Ochoa had been released “to be reunited with his family”.
Amid the sea of reporters at the airport, Ochoa was greeted by his relatives and hugged his daughter.
In 2001, Ochoa was extradited to the US after being arrested in Colombia in 1999 along with about 30 other suspects.
He was already serving a prison sentence in Colombia in the early 90s for his role as one of the leaders of the Medellin club. Along with his brothers, he was the first major trafficker to surrender under a program that protected cartel members from extradition to the US if they pleaded guilty to minor crimes in Colombia.
Ochoa and his brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again during the so-called Millennium operation for his involvement in the cocaine trafficking business in the US in the late 1990s.
In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to more than 30 years in a US court for his involvement in a group that brought an average of 30 tons of cocaine into the US each month between 1997 and 1999.
In the 1980s, he was one of the leading operators in Escobar’s Medellin ring, the main supplier of 80% of the US cocaine market.
The defunct Medellin cartel, along with the Cali cartel, was one of the most powerful and feared drug networks of the 1980s.
Its violent campaigns of bombings and assassinations led to the suspension of extradition of drug suspects between Colombia and the US, before resuming in 1997.
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