Legendary drug lord Fabio Ochoa walks free after 20 years in US prisons

BOGOTÁ, Colombia (AP): One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a key operator of the Medellin cartel has been deported back to the South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.

A short while later, Fabio Ochoa was again a free man.

Ochoa arrived in Bogota on a deportation flight on Monday afternoon, wearing a modest grey sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After stepping out of the plane, Ochoa was met by immigration officials in bulletproof vests. There were no police on site to detain him.

Immigration officials took his fingerprints and confirmed through a database that Ochoa is not wanted by Colombian authorities. The country’s immigration agency said on the social media platform X that Ochoa was “freed so that he could join his family”.

“I was framed,” Ochoa claimed as reporters at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport asked if he regretted his actions.

The former cartel boss smiled as he hugged his daughter, whom he had not seen in seven years, and said he would go to Medellin to live with his family.

“The nightmare is over,” said Ochoa, 67.

Ochoa and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine started flooding the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to US authorities, to the point that in 1987 they were included in the Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires.

Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution centre for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.

Ochoa was first indicted 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 Drug Enforcement Administration.

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 being extradited 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 in response to an indictment in Miami naming him and more than 40 people as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy.

He was the only suspect in that group who opted to go to trial, resulting in his conviction and a 30-year sentence. The other defendants got much lighter prison terms because most of them cooperated with the government.

Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take centre stage in the global drug trade.

But the former member of the Medellin cartel was recently depicted in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first fights the plucky businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of Miami’s cocaine market, and then makes an alliance with the drug trafficker, played by Sofia Vergara.

Ochoa is also depicted in the Netflix series Narcos, as the youngest son of an elite Medellin family that is into ranching and horse breeding and cuts a sharp contrast with Escobar, who came from more humble roots.

Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant US attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illicit drug proceeds and he expects that the former mafia boss will have a welcome return home.

“He won’t be retiring a poor man, that’s for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.