Drug lord to be extradited to US on $2bn smuggling charge

A former Medellin drug baron, Fabio Ochoa, has lost his last hope yesterday of escaping extradition from Colombia to the United States where he faces charges of money laundering and smuggling $1bn ($NZ2.3bn) of cocaine a month to the US and Europe, government officials said.

The only formality between Mr Ochoa and a trip to a US prison was the final government go-ahead. "He could be sent at any minute," said a Colombian Justice Ministry source. "There is nothing standing in the way of his extradition any more."

Mr Ochoa ­ once a henchman of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar ­ won an 11th-hour court order last week blocking his extradition. But yesterday a Bogota judge, Maria Claudia Merchan, dropped her injunction, which had demanded that US authorities provide further proof against Mr Ochoa. Her reasons were not immediately clear.

President Andres Pastrana signed Mr Ochoa's extradition order last month and stirred up controversy. Mr Ochoa argued that the government was betraying a promise made in the early 1990s not to extradite him if he surrendered. He had campaigned to stay in Colombia on the internet and in the media, rather than deploying the car bombs used by his cartel in the 1980s.

Mr Ochoa was out of prison less than three years before he was arrested in October 1999 in "Operation Millennium" ­ coordinated by the Colombian police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Agents said he was part of a ring exporting 30 tons of cocaine a month to the US and Europe. He faces a federal indictment from Fort Lauderdale in Florida.

But Mr Ochoa, who won a reduced sentence for his links to Escobar's notorious Medellin cartel after surrendering to authorities, insisted that this time he was not guilty.

He set up a website and paid for billboards proclaiming his innocence. He even took out an advertisement in Bogota's leading newspaper, El Tiempo, saying: "I turned myself in to justice with the guarantee I was not going to be extradited. I upheld the deal. I want the state to uphold the deal."

Mr Ochoa's sister, Martha Nieves, told Reuters she expected her brother to be extradited shortly. She accused the President of caving in to pressure from the US and of breaking the government's deal with her brother.

"We don't have visas to the US, so no, we won't even be able to see him," she said.

In his days with the Medellin cartel before Escobar was gunned down, Mr Ochoa helped wage urban warfare against extradition with the battle cry "better a tomb in Colombia than a cell in the United States".

He and a group of other drug barons had pushed for a brief ban on extradition after a relentless campaign of kidnappings, bombings and assassinations that killed and maimed thousands. The government lifted its ban on extradition of Colombian citizens to the US in 1997, under pressure from Washington.

- INDEPENDENT