One of the founders of the Medellín drug cartel has returned to Colombia after more than 20 years in prison in the United States for drug trafficking.
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, now 67 years old, was deported by the US government and landed in Bogotá on Monday as a free man.
Ochoa was one of the founding members of the notorious cartel and top lieutenant of notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The Medellín cartel dominated the cocaine trade and waged a violent campaign against the Colombian state before Escobar was killed in 1993.
Upon his arrival in Bogota, immigration officials searched Ochoa’s fingerprints in their database, the country’s immigration agency said.
Colombian authorities confirmed he was not wanted and said Ochoa had been released “to be reunited with his family.”
Amid a flood of reporters in the airport terminal, Ochoa was greeted by his relatives and hugged his daughter.
In 2001, Ochoa was flown to the United States after being arrested in Colombia in 1999 along with about 30 other suspected human traffickers.
He had already served a prison sentence in Colombia in the early 1990s for his role as one of the bosses of the Medellín cartel. Along with his brothers, he was the first major trafficker to surrender under a program that protected cartel members from extradition to the United States if they pleaded guilty to minor crimes in Colombia.
Ochoa and his brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again during the so-called Millennium Operation for his involvement in the cocaine smuggling business in the United States in the late 1990s.
In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced in a US court to more than 30 years in prison for his role in the cartel, which brought an average of 30 tons of cocaine into the US each month between 1997 and 1999.
In the 1980s, he was one of the top operators in Escobar’s Medellin ring, a supplier in its heyday that supplied 80% of the U.S. cocaine market.
The disbanded Medellín Cartel, along with the Cali Cartel, was one of the most powerful and feared drug networks of the 1980s.
His violent campaigns of bombings and assassinations led to extraditions of drug suspects between Colombia and the United States being suspended before resuming in 1997.
