Christina Noriega
BOGOTA, Colombia—In the next five weeks, Dairo Antonio Usuga, Colombia’s most-wanted drug lord who was captured on Oct. 23, is expected to be extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges filed in New York and Florida, according to Colombian authorities.
As head of the notorious drug cartel Clan del Golfo, Usuga—more commonly known by the alias “Otoniel”—is accused of steering an international criminal enterprise, processing and shipping more than 160 tons of cocaine each year to the United States and Europe, and wielding control over large swaths of Colombian territory, where his men imposed their own laws using terror and violence.
Washington had issued a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Otoniel, who faces two separate indictments in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York—where he is charged with a litany of crimes including support for narcotics trafficking, cocaine distribution and conspiracy to commit murder—and one indictment in the Southern District of Florida for drug trafficking. As Colombian media outlets have reported, guilty verdicts in his crimes could see him sentenced to life behind bars.
But Otoniel’s imminent extradition has stirred controversy in Colombia, where an untold number of Clan del Golfo victims have awaited justice for years. In Colombia, Otoniel is accused of recruiting children, ordering the killing of activists and sexually abusing minors, along with a slate of other crimes. More than 120 warrants are out for his arrest, and Otoniel has already been convicted in absentia on six counts of homicide, forced disappearance, forced displacement and illegal recruitment of minors.
Many of his victims would prefer to see him brought to justice in Colombia. But in a country whose decades of armed conflict are so intimately intertwined with drug trafficking, experts say that extradition requests often force Colombian authorities to decide between complying with the U.S. anti-narcotics policies and fulfilling its obligation to victims of atrocities.
By pledging to extradite Otoniel, President Ivan Duque’s government “is sending a message that it cares more about fulfilling its political commitments concerning drugs with the United States than truly guaranteeing access to justice for the victims in Colombia,” said Bogota-based human rights lawyer Alirio Uribe.
For victims’ organizations and human rights groups, Otoniel must answer for crimes committed against Colombia’s civilian population before being tried for drug trafficking crimes overseas, which could result in more lenient punishment under a plea bargain. While the Clan del Golfo is often characterized as a drug cartel abroad, it is widely seen in Colombia as a successor group of a now-defunct paramilitary organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC.
Mid-level AUC commanders that refused to demobilize by 2006 as part of a peace process at the time founded the Clan del Golfo, a group that today is estimated to have some 3,800 members. By all accounts, they have continued to employ the brutal tactics that made the AUC so widely feared.
“Otoniel’s crimes were committed here in Colombia, and the victims are here in Colombia,” one land rights activist and victim of forced displacement told me. “Before he’s extradited, he should answer for his crimes here and offer reparations to the victims.”
The land rights activist, who asked that his name be withheld due to security concerns, was forced to flee his home in the volatile Uraba region of northwestern Colombia in 1997. The area, which is also where Otoniel was captured, has long been a hotbed of paramilitary activity. In recent years, displaced families have attempted to repossess their land, even as they are subjected to threats that they believe come from the Clan del Golfo and from local agricultural corporations involved in plantain and palm plantations and cattle ranching.
“The paramilitaries never left,” said the activist. “The AUC demobilized, but the Clan del Golfo took their place. Life hasn’t changed too much here for the victims.”
In a press conference, Colombian Attorney General Francisco Barbosa responded to victims’ concerns by announcing that a team of prosecutors will work together to comb through open investigations into Otoniel’s crimes and interrogate him before he is extradited, in order to ensure that all of his victims are accounted for.
“Otoniel’s crimes were committed here in Colombia, and the victims are here in Colombia. Before he’s extradited, he should answer for his crimes here.”
At the same time, Duque recently told the local newspaper El Tiempo that Otoniel would face charges in Colombia once he has finished serving whatever prison time he is sentenced to in the United States.
But experts said there are no guarantees this will happen. Similar cases in the past have underscored the challenges of bringing extradited criminals to justice in Colombia after they are brought to the United States, where judges are under no obligation to collaborate with Colombian officials to investigate human rights violations committed during the armed conflict.
“There is a 50-50 chance that Otoniel will face justice in Colombia,” said Mariana Diaz, an independent analyst on post-conflict Colombia. “There are cases where [extradited] paramilitary leaders were returned to Colombia and are answering to the Colombian justice system.” But, she added, in other cases they haven’t.
As an example, she cited the drug lord Carlos Lehder, who founded the notorious Medellin Cartel alongside Pablo Escobar before being captured and extradited to the U.S. in 1987. Lehder was sentenced to life plus 135 years in prison, but that sentence was reduced after he testified against former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, and Lehder was released last year. He is now believed to be in a U.S. witness protection program.
In Otoniel’s case, “It’s impossible to say what will happen,” Diaz concluded.
Despite the controversy that extraditions raise in Colombia, U.S. officials have pressed for them since the onset of the War on Drugs. However, the pace of extraditions only increased starting in 2002, when Alvaro Uribe was elected president and the U.S. ramped up aid to Colombia to combat drug production and organized crime.
By the end of Uribe’s two terms in 2009, more than 900 people had been extradited, mostly on drug trafficking charges and by request of the United States, according to a 2011 report from the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian think tank. Diaz, who co-authored the report, said that extraditions have become a way for the U.S. to show victories in a war where otherwise there aren’t many.
She added that plea bargains and other negotiations with U.S. authorities had increasingly made extradition attractive to criminals in recent years. A 2016 New York Times investigation reviewed dozens of cases of extradited paramilitary leaders, who on average served only seven and a half years in prison.
Many human rights groups argue that the case for extradition does not justify jeopardizing victims’ rights, particularly when there often appear to be ulterior motives involved. In one notable case, 14 paramilitary leaders were suddenly extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges in 2008. It was widely seen as an effort by Uribe to prevent them from divulging information about their own ties to senior Colombian lawmakers and Uribe’s own family.
Despite assurances from the government, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights warned at the time that extraditions such as these affected the Colombian state’s obligation to guarantee the rights of victims to truth, justice and reparations for crimes committed by paramilitary groups.
“Tell me what notable truth came out of the cases in which [top paramilitary leaders] were convicted in the United States? They went to jail, left, and nothing happened,” said Diaz.
After Otoniel was captured, Duque declared that the Clan del Golfo was effectively finished. But Uribe, the human rights lawyer, warned that if Otoniel is extradited, justice would be denied and the violence will continue.
“Victims want these crimes to stop. They want access to justice, and for these characters to collaborate with the justice system to dismantle these criminal structures,” said Uribe. “If we extradite Otoniel, we extradite the truth.”
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