BREAKING: Colombian authorities say they captured Dairo Antonio Úsuga, a drug cartel leader and one of the country’s most wanted traffickers. The U.S. State Department had offered up to $5M for information leading to Úsuga's arrest and/or conviction.
President Iván Duque likened the arrest Saturday of Dairo Antonio Úsuga to the capture three decades ago of Pablo Escobar.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.
But 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.Authorities said intelligence provided by the U.S. and U.K. 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.
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. Leaks and a network of safe houses at rural homesteads allowed him for years to resist a scorched-earth campaign by the military against the Gulf Clan.
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