Colombia Captures Top Drug Lord

BOGOTA - Colombia’s most wanted drug lord Daniel Rendon Herrera was captured Wednesday in a jungle raid involving hundreds of police officers.

Daniel Rendon Herrera 43, alias “Don Mario”, was found alone, eating rice out of his hands, hiding under a palm trees in the jungles of northern Antioquia province, from where his gang smuggled tonnes of cocaine from the Caribbean coast toward the United States, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said.

When he was surrounded, the once-feared cocaine baron was living “virtually like a dog, curled up and clinging to that palm tree, where he had been for two days,” Santos told reporters.

Herrera is accused of shipping about 100 tonnes of the drug from Colombia’s Caribbean coast to the United States. Santos said he is also responsible for at least 3,000 murders.

The bearded captive had his hands bound in front of him as he was led onto a Bogota-bound plane. In a blue and brown T-shirt and loose fitting gray pants, Rendon Herrera looked somber and disheveled as he boarded the flight.

Colombia had offered a $2 million reward for information leading to the capture of Rendon Herrera, who is wanted by the United States on drug trafficking charges.

As authorities closed in earlier this year, Rendon Herrera offered his gunmen $1,000 for every officer they killed. He also battled against rival gangs, made up mostly of former paramilitary members, that tried to horn in on his turf.

His ruthless style recalled that of Colombia’s best-known drug baron Pablo Escobar, who waged war against the state in the 1980s until he was gunned down by security forces on a Medellin rooftop in 1993.

Rendon Herrera has been charged by U.S. authorities, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in Washington. The spokesman did not say whether the United States would seek his extradition.

Herrera belonged to one of the paramilitary groups that began demobilizing after a 2003 peace deal with the government, but he refused to confess his crimes as required under the accord and went into hiding.

He is the brother of a jailed paramilitary warlord known as “El Aleman”, or “The German”, a nickname he earned for his reputation of enforcing strict discipline among his troops.

Rendon Herrera is accused of running cocaine trafficking in the area controlled by his brother in the 1990s, when right-wing paramilitaries battled leftist guerrillas for control of rural Colombia.

The South American country, the world’s largest cocaine producer, has become less violent under President Alvaro Uribe, who has used billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to battle the guerrillas and disarm the paramilitaries.

Much of the cocaine is smuggled to the United States through Mexico, where thousands of people have been killed by Mexican cartels that have taken over from Colombian gangs as the dominant drug traffickers in the Americas. Colombia continues to export about 600 tonnes of cocaine every year and law enforcement efforts have done little to reduce production, according to the United Nations.

“Don Mario was the most important drug trafficker out there, but someone will take his place very quickly and it will be business as usual,” said Bogota-based security consultant Pablo Casas.

“His organization is as well structured as any company, where the CEO can be replaced at any time,” Casas said.

The Uribe government hailed his capture as a major victory for law and order. “This is good news for the security of all Colombians and bolsters democracy,” Uribe’s press spokesman Cesar Velasquez said in a statement.

Please pray for more successes against drug cartells in South America and especially in Mexico.

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