One of the world’s most hunted drug traffickers — whose criminal
organisation compared in size to that of late drug lord Pablo Escobar — has been arrested in Brazil as part of a major international bust, officials said.
Brazilian authorities said on Wednesday that Colombian-born Pablo Rayo-Montano, who had been on the run for a decade, was captured the day before at his home in São Paulo as part of a three-year operation spearheaded by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and police in Brazil, Panama and Colombia.
More than three dozen others were arrested during simultaneous raids on Tuesday in the United States and Latin America, officials said. Also seized were three islands owned by Rayo-Montano off the coast of Panama and a trove of expensive artwork, yachts, real estate holdings and millions in cash.
The cartel allegedly used speedboats, cargo vessels and submarine-like vessels to ship more than 15 tonnes of cocaine a month from clandestine Colombian ports to the United States and Europe, officials said.
”The Rayo-Montano trafficking organisation ranked up there with Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel in terms of the amount of cocaine it was able to smuggle into the United States,” Dave Gaddis, head of the DEA in Bogota, Colombia, told the Associated Press.
Escobar, history’s most notorious drug trafficker, led the now defunct Medellin cocaine cartel and was shot dead by police in December 1993. Much of the drug trafficking industry was subsequently taken over by Colombia’s Cali Cartel.
Called Twin Oceans, the latest operation targeted the drug network allegedly run by Jackson Orozco-Gil and the brothers Domingo and Mars Micolta-Hurtado from Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
All three were arrested on Tuesday in Colombia and Panama.
But the godfather of the organization, the DEA said, was ”Don Pablo,” who managed the multinational empire from Sáo Paulo, where he’s been living the past three years.
”The Rayo-Montano organisation had its own private, rogue navy to run a drug business that was nearly as sophisticated as a small nation,” DEA administrator Karen Tandy said in a press release on Wednesday.
As a result of the investigation, officials in nine countries — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States — arrested more than 100 people and seized 47,5 tonnes of cocaine and nearly $70-million in assets throughout the world, the DEA said.
Of the more than 30 arrests on Tuesday, six were made in the United States, including one in Los Angeles in which a federal agent posed as a pizza deliverer, a DEA official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the operation. Four people were arrested in Miami. One arrest was made in Indianapolis.
The US Department of Justice considered the Rayo-Montano organisation one of its top drug targets, with a comprehensive infrastructure capable of everything from the production of cocaine and heroin in Colombia to smuggling and wholesale distribution in Europe and the United States.
Rayo-Montano’s arrest in Sáo Paulo came amid violence that has claimed at least 133 lives since Friday.
”It’s estimated the amount of cocaine supplied by this organisation was enough to poison 37-million consumers,” Colombia’s anti-narcotics police said in a news release on Wednesday.
DEA officials said the United States would seek to extradite Rayo-Montano so that he could stand trial in a US court. But a spokesperson for the federal police in Sáo Paulo said he could be extradited only after first being tried in Brazil.
Colombian police said Rayo-Montano began trafficking drugs in the early 1990s from the Pacific port of Buenaventura and quickly rose to prominence within the Cali cartel alongside a top leader, Helmer ”Pacho” Herrera, who was killed in a Colombian jail in 1998.
He’s accused of working with all of Colombia’s major narco-terrorist groups, including the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, which was accused of being the largest drug trafficking organisation in a recent US indictment of its top leadership.
Rayo-Montano is believed to have fled to his islands in Panama in 1996 after being charged with drug trafficking by a Colombian court. When authorities learned of his whereabouts, Rayo-Montano escaped on a fishing boat and eventually surfaced in Brazil, police said.
Police said that in Brazil, Rayo-Montano set up a number of companies, including an art gallery in an upscale district, to launder drug proceeds.
Rayo-Montano was arrested with his wife and Miguel Fridber Felmanas — his alleged right-hand man — as well as Felmanas’ wife and three children. Two other men were also arrested. – Sapa-AP