Drug Lord Returns to Colombia After Serving 20 Years in U.S. Prison

 Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, a founding member of the Medellín drug cartel, has returned to Colombia after serving over 20 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.

Now 67, Ochoa was deported by U.S. authorities and arrived in Bogotá on Monday as a free man.

As a senior lieutenant to the infamous Pablo Escobar, Ochoa played a key role in the cartel's operations. The Medellín cartel once controlled the global cocaine trade and orchestrated a violent war against the Colombian government before Escobar's death in 1993.

Upon his arrival in Bogotá, immigration officials confirmed Fabio Ochoa Vásquez’s identity by running his fingerprints through their database, Colombia's immigration agency reported.

The agency stated that Ochoa is not wanted by Colombian authorities and was released to "be reunited with his family." At the airport, amid a throng of reporters, Ochoa embraced his relatives and shared an emotional hug with his daughter.

Ochoa was extradited to the U.S. in 2001 following his arrest in Colombia in 1999 during a crackdown that targeted around 30 alleged traffickers. Before this, he had already served a prison sentence in Colombia in the early 1990s for his role as a leader of the Medellín cartel. He and his brothers were among the first major traffickers to surrender under a program that offered protection from U.S. extradition in exchange for guilty pleas to minor offenses in Colombia.

Released from Colombian prison in 1996, Ochoa was rearrested during the Millennium Operation for his involvement in cocaine smuggling to the U.S. in the late 1990s. In 2003, he was sentenced in a U.S. court to more than 30 years for his role in a cartel operation that smuggled an average of 30 tons of cocaine into the U.S. each month between 1997 and 1999.

In the 1980s, Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was a key figure in Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel, which at its peak supplied 80% of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

The now-defunct Medellín cartel, alongside the Cali cartel, was among the most powerful and feared drug organizations of the era. Its reign of violence, marked by bombings and assassinations, temporarily halted the extradition of drug suspects between Colombia and the U.S., a practice that was only reinstated in 1997.