NEW YORK — For years, the person often known as Otoniel was seen as one of many world’s most harmful drug lords, the elusive boss of a cartel and paramilitary group with a blood-drenched grip on a lot of northern Colombia.
On Tuesday, Dairo Antonio Úsuga stated he was “accepting responsibility for the crimes that I have committed” as he was sentenced to 45 years in jail within the U.S.
“I apologize to the governments of the United States and of Colombia and to the victims of the crimes that I have committed,” Úsuga, 51, stated by way of a court docket interpreter.
The former chief of the infamous Clan de Golfo, or Gulf Clan, had pleaded responsible in January to high-level drug trafficking fees, admitting he oversaw the smuggling of tons of U.S.-bound cocaine and acknowledging “there was a lot of violence.”
The U.S. agreed to not search a life sentence in an effort to get him extradited from Colombia, the place he faces the prospect of additional prosecution if he survives lengthy sufficient to be launched within the States.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland stated in an announcement that the 45-year sentence confirmed the nation would maintain prison kingpins accountable, “no matter where they are and no matter how long it takes,” for harming Americans.
Úsuga and his legal professionals sought to forged him as a product of his homeland’s woes — distant rural hardship, surrounded by guerilla warfare, recruited into it at age 16 and hardened by a long time of shedding mates, fellow troopers and family members to violence.
“Having been born into a region of great conflict, I grew up within this conflict,” he stated in court docket, advising younger individuals “not to take the path that I have taken.”
“We should leave armed conflicts in the past,” he added.
But U.S. District Judge Dora Irizarry, invoking her personal childhood in a South Bronx housing complicated that she stated was wracked with drug dealing and violence, advised the kingpin that atmosphere was no excuse.
“People growing up in these communities, who have the will and have the desire, work their way out of it,” she stated, telling Úsuga that he had possibilities “to leave this life behind — and you didn’t.”
For a long time, almost each Colombian’s life has been touched by the nation’s many-sided battle. A mish-mash of leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary teams, narcotraffickers and different bands of criminals have warred for management of mountainous swaths of the nation.
The violence has claimed the lives of greater than 1 million individuals, and left thousands and thousands extra forcibly displaced, disappeared and in any other case harmed, based on information from the nation’s Victim’s Unit. The authorities has sought to signal peace accords with the armed teams however has struggled to consolidate peace in a fancy battle rooted in rural poverty and lack of alternatives.
Even for a prosecutor’s workplace that has received trafficking convictions of such figures as Mexican drug baron Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and former Mexican Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, Úsuga was a serious goal. Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney Breon Peace stated in an announcement that the distress spawned by Úsuga’s “incredibly violent, vengeful, and bloody reign” would possibly by no means be absolutely calculated.
Úsuga fought alongside each left- and right-wing combatants at totally different factors in his life earlier than turning into half after which supreme chief of the Gulf Clan, often known as one in every of Colombia’s strongest and brutal forces. He was the nation’s most-wanted kingpin earlier than his arrest in 2021, and he had been underneath indictment within the U.S. since 2009.
The Gulf Clan, also called the Gaitanist Self Defense Forces of Colombia (or AGC, for its initials in Spanish), is a separate prison group from the Gulf drug cartel in Mexico. The Colombian group holds sway in an space wealthy with smuggling routes for medicine, weapons and migrants. Boasting military-grade weaponry and 1000’s of members, the group has fought rival gangs, paramilitary teams and Colombian authorities. It financed its rule by imposing “taxes” on cocaine produced, saved or transported by way of its territory. As a part of Úsuga’s plea deal, he agreed to forfeit $216 million.
Úsuga ordered killings of perceived enemies — one in every of whom was tortured, buried alive and beheaded — and terrorized the general public at massive, prosecutors say. They say the kingpin ordered up a dayslong, stay-home-or-die “strike” after his brother was killed in a police raid, and he supplied bounties for the lives of police and troopers — even $70,000 for a police canine.
“The damage that this man named Otoniel has caused to our family is unfathomable,” relations of slain police officer Milton Eliecer Flores Arcila wrote to the court docket. The widow of Officer John Gelber Rojas Colmenares, killed in 2017, stated Úsuga “took away the chance I had of growing old with the love of my life.”
“All I am asking for is justice for my daughter, for myself, for John’s family, for his friends and in honor of my husband, that his death not go unpunished,” she wrote. All the relations’ names have been redacted in court docket filings.
Despite manhunts and U.S. and Colombian reward gives topping $5 million in whole, Úsuga lengthy evaded seize, partly by rotating by way of a community of rural protected homes.
After his arrest, Gulf Clan members tried a cyanide poisoning of a possible witness in opposition to him and tried to kill the witness’ lawyer, based on prosecutors.
• Associated Press author Megan Janetsky contributed from Mexico City.
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