Legendary drug lord Fabio Ochoa is deported to Colombia and walks free after 20 years in US prisons

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.

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’s El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday, wearing a grey sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After stepping out of the plane, the former cartel boss was met by immigration officials in bullet proof vests. There were no police on site to detain him. Colombia’s national immigration agency promptly posted a brief statement on the social media platform X, saying Ochoa was “freed so that he could join his family” after immigration officials took his fingerprints and confirmed through a database that he is not wanted by Colombian authorities. Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine started flooding the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. 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 center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.