One of Colombia’s legendary drug traffickers and a Key operator of the Medellín cartel has been deported to the South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.
Shortly after, Fabio Ochoa was a free man again.
Ochoa arrived at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday, wearing a gray sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After getting off the plane, the former cartel boss was greeted by immigration officials wearing bulletproof vests. There were no police on the scene to arrest him.
Fernando Vergara/AP
Colombia’s national immigration agency quickly posted a brief statement on social media platform database that is not searched by the Colombian authorities.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began flooding the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, to the point that in 1987 they were included on the list of billionaires from Forbes magazine.
Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellín in 1993.
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Ochoa was first indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the 1986 murder of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine for the Medellin cartel but became a DEA informant.
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s under an agreement in which they avoided extradition to the United States.
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again three years later for drug trafficking and extradited to the United States in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 people as part of a conspiracy. of drug trafficking. .
He was the only suspect in that group who chose to go to trial, which resulted in his conviction and a 30-year sentence. The other defendants received much lighter prison sentences because most of them cooperated with the government.
Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade.
Fernando Vergara/AP
But the former member of the Medellín cartel recently appeared in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first fights brave businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of the Miami cocaine market and then makes an alliance with the drug trafficker, played by Sofía Vergara.
Ochoa is also represented in the Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite family from Medellín that is dedicated to livestock and horse breeding and marks a stark contrast to Escobar, who comes from more humble roots.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was part of the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illicit drug proceeds and hopes the former mob boss gets a welcome homecoming.
“He won’t retire a poor man, that’s for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.
