One of the legendary drug lords in Colombia and a the main operator of the Medellin cartel was sent back to the South American country, after serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
Soon after, Fabio Ochoa was once again a free man.
Ochoa arrived at Bogota's El Dorado airport on an export flight on Monday, wearing a gray T-shirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After he stepped off the plane, the former cartel boss was met by immigration officials in bulletproof vests. There were no police on the scene to detain him.
Fernando Vergara / AP
Colombia's national immigration agency quickly posted a brief statement on social media platform X, saying Ochoa had been “freed so he could join his family” after immigration officials in the take his fingerprints and verify through a database that the Colombian authorities do not want him.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began to flood the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to US authorities, to the point that in 1987 they were arrested into Forbes Magazine's billionaires list.
Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel he headed Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.
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Ochoa was first prosecuted in the US for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel but became an informant for the Enforcement Administration Drugs.
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa turned himself in to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s under a deal in which they avoided extradition to the US
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again three years later for drug trafficking and was extradited to the US in 2001 to face charges there in Miami naming him and more than 40 other people as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy. .
He was the only suspect in that group who chose to go to trial, and as a result he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years. The other defendants received much lighter prison terms because most of them cooperated with the government.
Ochoa's name has faded from popular memory because Mexican drug traffickers are at the heart of the global drug trade.
Fernando Vergara / AP
But the former member of the Medellin cartel was recently featured in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first battles the ruthless businessman Griselda Blanco for control of the Miami cocaine market and the then forms an alliance with the drug trafficker, played by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa is also shown in the Narcos Netflix seriesas the youngest son of an elite Medellin family that is involved in ranching and horse breeding and cuts very differently from Escobar, who came from humbler roots.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to get hold of the Ochoa family's illicit funds from drugs and he expects that a former mafia boss would be welcome back home.
“He's not going to retire poor, that's for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.
