Once Colombia’s most-wanted drug lord, the kingpin known as Otoniel faces sentencing in US

NEW YORK — For years, the person often called 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 faces sentencing to not less than 20 years in a U.S. jail. He pleaded responsible in January to high-level drug trafficking costs, admitting he oversaw the smuggling of tons of U.S.-bound cocaine and acknowledging “there was a number of violence with the guerillas and the legal gangs.”

The U.S. agreed to not search a life sentence so as to get him extradited from Colombia. As a substitute, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are in search of a 45-year time period for Úsuga, who’s 51 and has a variety of medical issues.

His “want for management and revenge merely can’t be overstated, nor can the diploma of hurt he inflicted,” prosecutors wrote in a latest courtroom submitting. They described his decadelong management of Colombia’s infamous Gulf Clan group as a “reign of terror.”

Úsuga’s legal professionals have sought to forged him as a product of his homeland’s woes — a person born into distant rural poverty, surrounded by guerilla warfare, recruited into it at age 16 and cast by a long time of seeing pals, fellow troopers and family members killed. Through the years, he allied with each left- and right-wing combatants within the nation’s long-running inner battle.

Understanding his crimes “requires a better analysis of the historical past of violence and trauma that formed Colombia as a nation and Mr. Úsuga-David as a human being,” social employee Melissa Lang wrote, utilizing a fuller model of his final identify, in a July report that his attorneys filed in courtroom.

Úsuga was Colombia’s most-wanted kingpin earlier than his arrest in 2021, and he had been beneath indictment within the U.S. since 2009.

The Gulf Clan, also called the Gaitanist Self Protection Forces of Colombia, holds sway in an space wealthy with smuggling routes for medicine, weapons and migrants. Boasting military-grade weapons and hundreds 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 its territory. (As a part of his plea deal, he agreed to forfeit $216 million.)

“In army work, homicides had been dedicated,” Úsuga stated, by a courtroom interpreter, when pleading responsible.

Úsuga ordered killings of perceived enemies — considered one of whom was tortured, buried alive and beheaded — and terrorized the general public at massive, prosecutors say. They are saying the kingpin ordered up a dayslong, stay-home-or-die “strike” after his brother was killed in a police raid, and he provided bounties for the lives of police and troopers.

“The harm that this man named Otoniel has prompted to our household is unfathomable,” family of slain police officer Milton Eliecer Flores Arcila wrote to the courtroom. The widow of Officer John Gelber Rojas Colmenares, killed in 2017, stated Úsuga “took away the possibility I had of rising previous with the love of my life.”

“All I’m asking for is justice for my daughter, for myself, for John’s household, for his pals and in honor of my husband, that his loss of life not go unpunished,” she wrote. All of the family’ names had been redacted in courtroom filings.

Regardless of manhunts and U.S. and Colombian reward presents topping $5 million in whole, Úsuga lengthy evaded seize, partly by rotating by 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.