One of Colombia's most wanted men was arrested on Saturday. "We had been behind him for seven years," General Fernando Navarro, head of the Colombian army, said on Saturday. Dairo Antonio Usuga, alias "Otoniel", the most powerful drug trafficker in the country was also wanted by the American authorities who offered five million for any information allowing his location or his capture. The 50-year-old man was listed by the US State Department as the head of an organization "heavily armed, extremely violent", and using "violence and intimidation" to control the roads of drug trafficking and laboratories. manufacture of cocaine.

Colombian President Ivan Duque compared the arrest of this leader of the Clan del Golfo, the main gang in the country of South America, to the fall of Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin cartel (north-west), shot dead by the police in 1993. But how did a peasant "with no particular ideology" who had turned left guerrilla defector into a far-right paramilitary militia finally became the biggest drug trafficker in Colombia?

A criminal network present in nearly 300 municipalities

Born September 15, 1971 in Neclocli, located on the Gulf of Urabá, in the northwest of Colombia and strategically placed on the border of Panama, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, he had taken the lead of the Clan del Golfo after the death of his brother, Juan de Dios, alias "Giovanni", during a clash with the police in 2012. The two men had set up a criminal network present in nearly 300 of the 1,102 municipalities of Colombia, mainly on the Pacific coast, from where most drug shipments leave, mostly to the United States.

Dairo Antonio Usuga had "an important portfolio of criminal activities, including the exploitation of illegal mines and the passage of migrants to Panama," according to security expert Ariel Avila.

According to the organized crime investigation center InSight Crime, the Clan del Golfo also works with small street gangs that carry out micro-trafficking in drugs, extortion and murder by hired killers for them. .

"He was not a revolutionary"

"Otoniel", seventh of nine children born to Ana Celsa David and Juan de Dios Usuga, a couple who lived from the sale of cattle, pigs and poultry in the department of Antioquia (north-west), used guerrilla techniques to to sow those who pursued him.

He only traveled on foot or on the back of a mule, never slept two consecutive nights in the same place, according to the Colombian authorities who deployed up to a thousand men to try to capture him.

At 18, he joined the People's Liberation Army (EPL), a Marxist guerrilla demobilized in 1991 after 26 years of rebellion.

“He was not a revolutionary.

But there was only that and he left with them ”, had told his mother in 2015 in an interview with the daily El Tiempo in 2015. But Dairo Antonio Usuga did not demobilize at the same time as the EPL.

From 1993 to 1994, he joined the Autodefense Paysanne de Cordoba y Uraba (ACCU) militias, a far-right paramilitary group created to fight the guerrillas and linked to drug trafficking.

The ACCU was part of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), demobilized in 2006 under the right-wing ex-president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

Otoniel “was a peasant with no particular ideology”, according to Ariel Avila, but who felt “betrayed” by the demobilization process and decided to remain underground.

Did you see ?

Colombia: Part of Pablo Escobar's hippos sterilized to control their population

Miscellaneous

Marseille: a drug trafficker suspected of murder arrested in Colombia

  • Portrait

  • Cocaine

  • Drug

  • Drug traffickers

  • Colombia

  • Drug traffic

  • World