BOGOTA (AFP) – Medellin Cartel co-founder and former lieutenant to notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar Fabio Ochoa Vasquez was deported to Colombia on Monday after serving a long United States (US) prison sentence.
The 67-year-old, who is no longer a wanted man in his home country, landed at Bogota airport, where he was mobbed by reporters.
Ochoa was released from prison in the US on December 3 after spending more than two decades behind bars.
In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to more than 30 years and a USD25,000 fine for being part of an organisation that brought an average of 30 tonnes of cocaine into the country each month between 1997 and 1999.
Escobar, once the most wanted drug lord on the planet, had already been killed by the Colombian police a decade earlier.
Of the founders of what became the world’s largest drug organisation, only Ochoa and Carlos Lehder – known as ‘Rambo’ – were extradited to the US.
Lehder was released in 2020 and travelled to Germany because of his dual nationality.
Ochoa turned himself in to Colombian authorities in 1990 under a special law issued by the government of then-president Cesar Gaviria offering reduced sentences and non-extradition for criminals who gave in, confessed their crimes and betrayed their partners.
He was released in 1996 after serving a sentence of almost six years in a high-security prison near Medellin.
Ochoa, however, returned to trafficking and was arrested again in October 1999 as part of a multinational operation that led to the capture of dozens of alleged drug lords.
