BOGOTA, COLOMBIA —
Colombian safety forces have captured the nation’s most needed drug trafficker, a rural warlord who evaded a decade-long manhunt by corrupting state officers and aligning himself with combatants on the left and proper.

President Ivan Duque likened the arrest Saturday of Dairo Antonio Usuga to the seize three many years in the past of Pablo Escobar.

Photos circulating on social media present Usuga handcuffed along with his face planted to the bottom.

Usuga, higher recognized by his alias Otoniel, is the alleged head of the much-feared Gulf Clan, whose military of assassins has terrorized a lot of northern Colombia to realize management of main cocaine smuggling routes by way of thick jungles north to Central America and onto the U.S.

He is lengthy been a fixture on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted fugitives listing, for whose seize it had been providing a US$5 million reward. He was first indicted in 2009, in Manhattan federal courtroom, on narcotics prices and for allegedly offering help to a far-right paramilitary group designated a terrorist group by the U.S. authorities.

However like a lot of his gunmen, he is additionally cycled by way of the ranks of a number of guerrilla teams, most just lately claiming to steer the Gaitanist Self Protection Forces of Colombia, after a mid-Twentieth century Colombian leftist firebrand.

He additionally faces prison prices in Miami, Tampa and Brooklyn federal courts.

Authorities stated intelligence supplied by the U.S. and U.Okay. led greater than 500 troopers and members of Colombia’s particular forces to Usuga’s jungle hideout, which was protected by an eight rings of safety.

Usuga for years flew below the radar of authorities by eschewing the excessive profile of Colombia’s higher recognized narcos.

He and his brother, who was killed in a raid in 2012, obtained their begin as gunmen for the now-defunct leftist guerrilla group referred to as the Well-liked Liberation Military after which later switched sides and joined the rebels’ battlefield enemies, a right-wing paramilitary group.

He refused to disarm when that militia signed a peace treaty with the federal government in 2006, as a substitute delving deeper into Colombia’s prison underworld and organising operations within the strategic Gulf of Uraba area in northern Colombia, a serious drug hall surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean sea on both aspect.

Leaks and a community of protected homes at rural homesteads allowed him for years to withstand a scorched-earth marketing campaign by the navy towards the Gulf Clan.

However the battle was taking its toll on the 50-year-old fugitive, who even whereas on the run insisted on sleeping on orthopedic mattresses to ease a again harm. In 2017, he confirmed his face for the primary time from time to time of Pope Francis’ go to to the nation, publishing a video wherein he requested for his group be allowed to put down its weapons and demobilize as a part of the nation’s peace course of with the much-larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

His arrest is one thing of a lift for the conservative Duque, who legislation and order rhetoric has been no match for hovering manufacturing of cocaine.

Land devoted to the manufacturing of coca — the uncooked ingredient of cocaine — jumped 16% final 12 months to a report 245,000 hectares, a degree unseen in 20 years of U.S. eradication efforts, in response to a White Home report.

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Joshua Goodman reported from Miami