Blow To Colombia Coke Ring
In the biggest blow to Colombian drug trafficking since 1995, authorities arrested 30 people including Fabio Ochoa, a leader in the once-powerful Medellin cartel, the national police director announced Wednesday.
Also arrested, reports CBS News Correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis, was a trafficker known as "Juvenal," described as the most prolific drug trafficker and money launderer in the world.
The suspects were seized Tuesday night and those captured in Colombia will be extradited to the United States for trial, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano told reporters. Most of the suspects were arrested in Colombia, with others captured in Ecuador, Mexico and the United States, he said.
"This was an immense operation, an operation you could call perfect," Serrano told reporters after informing President Andres Pastrana.
He said Colombian police worked "shoulder-to-shoulder" with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and CIA in the yearlong investigation that began in Houston and Ecuador and tracked the ring's operations all the way to Europe.
"These people made gigantic shipments of drugs and flooded the U.S. markets," Serrano told RCN radio, adding that the evidence against the suspects was gathered "almost completely in the United States."
The sting was dubbed Operation Millennium and Serrano called it the most important blow to drug traffickers in Colombia's since the Cali cocaine cartel's leaders were captured in 1995, ending the era of huge, vertically organized cartels and splintering the business.
Colombia is the world's leading exporter of cocaine and a growing source of heroin.
Ochoa, 42, was arrested at his home in Medellin, the country's No. 2 city, authorities said. Three years ago, he had been released from prison after serving two-thirds of an 8 1/2-year sentence for drug trafficking.
From a well-known ranching and horse-breeding family, Ochoa was among leaders of the Medellin cartel, whose fall was consummated by the December 1993 killing by police of cartel boss Pablo Escobar.
"You would have thought that the Ochoas would be careful, attending to their fortune," Serrano said. Ochoa's two older brothers, Jorge Luis and Juan David, also served jail time in Colombia for drug trafficking and were released in 1996.
U.S. officials in Washington said they would not be able to try Ochoa under indictments brought in the early 1980s unless Colombia revises its extradition law.
The new U.S. indictment unsealed in Miami covers only crimes committed after Dec. 17, 1997 when Colombia restored extradition, they said.
Under the new law, Colombia can only extradite its nationals for crimes committed after that date.
Colombia has not extradited anyone for trial in the United States since 1990, when it delivered Caribbean coast trafficker Joaquin Oswald Oswaldo Gallo.
The U.S. officials said they have 12 extradition requsts already pending under the new Colombian law, and no one has yet been extradited under it.
To pressure Colombian leaders into preventing the extradition of its leaders to the United States, the Medellin cartel waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the last 1980s and early 1990s that claimed hundreds of lives.