After 25 years in prison, Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man is free again. The Bureau of Prisons reported that Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, 67, head of the Miami outpost of the Colombian Medellín cartel in the 1980s, will return to Colombia after serving part of a 30-year sentence for cocaine trafficking in the United States.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ochoa Vásquez, who came from an elite Colombian family of horse breeders, began working with Escobar until he became his right-hand man and drug lord in Florida, so much so that he and his boss were included on Forbes Magazine‘s list of billionaires in 1987. At the time, the Medellín cartel supplied about 80 percent of the global cocaine market, and Colombia is still the world’s largest producer and exporter, responsible for 90 percent of the white powder that is seized in the United States as of 2019.
Ochoa Vásquez was first convicted in the United States in 1986 for being an active participant in the murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, Barry Seal. In 1990, he was arrested in Colombia for drug trafficking and placed on the list of the “Dozen Most Wanted,” Colombians who ran the cocaine trade in America. Not until 2001, however, was he extradited to the U.S. on a separate charge, filed in Miami, of conspiracy to possess and import drugs on a large scale. Forty other people were involved, but Ochoa Vásquez was the only one who chose to go to trial. The result was conviction and a sentence of 30 years in prison. Most of the others cooperated with the U.S. government and obtained lighter sentences.
The film world has told the story of the Medellín cartel several times, with the TV series Narcos, released on Netflix in 2015, and the film American Made in 2017 starring Tom Cruise.
