It is, according to the Colombian President Iván Duque the world’s most feared drug trafficker
. Dairo Antonio Úsuga, alias Otoniel, 50, was arrested Saturday, October 23 in the north of the country, during an operation mobilizing more than five hundred police and military, as well as British and American intelligence agents. Since 2012, he had headed the powerful Clan del Golfo, an organization formed from former paramilitary groups, reputed to be the largest exporter of cocaine in Colombia.
High-level criminal, Otoniel went through various armed organizations: enlisted at 18 in the People’s Liberation Army (ELN), Maoist guerrilla largely demobilized in 1991, he then joined the Peasant Self-Defense militias of Cordoba and Uraba. This far-right paramilitary group, created in the 1990s to fight the guerrillas, merged into the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which set the country on fire in the early 2000s and demobilized in very controversial conditions in 2005.
Drugs, extortion, prostitution …
The del Golfo clan operates, according to experts, in more than two hundred Colombian municipalities. Drugs, illegal exploitation of gold, extortion, prostitution, human trafficking, the organization has several strings to its bow. She is responsible for multiple massacres, population displacements, assassinations of local leaders …
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Since the signing of the peace agreement of November 2016 between the government and the former Farcs guerrilla, it has fought against various armed groups to control the territories abandoned by the former Farc at the expense of populations who inexorably suffer from resumption of war.
According to organized crime investigation site Insight Crime, the del Golfo clan is a pioneer in the method of criminal franchises
and its organization is very different from the pyramid structures of the drug cartels of the 1990s.
Not a fatal blow
The arrest of Otoniel, compared by President Duque à la chute by Pablo Escobar
, famous capo of the Medellín Cartel shot down by the army at the end of 1993, therefore does not necessarily put a stop to the organization – which risks becoming even more atomized – or to cocaine trafficking, which does not never worn so well.
Otoniel, already sentenced six times by Colombian justice, will he be extradited to the United States, which has put his head at a price of five million dollars? Will he reveal his secrets? In 2017, he announced that he wanted to negotiate with the authorities. He certainly has a lot to tell about the history of paramilitary and mafia groups, their ties to the political class and the land grabbing process to which they have contributed.
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