One of the founders of the Medellin drug cartel returned to Colombia after serving more than 20 years in prison in the United States for drug trafficking.
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, now 67, was expelled by the US government and landed in Bogota on Monday a free man.
Ochoa was one of the founding members of the notorious cartel and had been a main lieutenant of the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The Medellin cartel dominated the cocaine trade and led a violent campaign against the Colombian state before Escobar was killed in 1993.
Upon his arrival in Bogota, immigration officials led OCHOA fingerprints via their database, said the country's immigration agency.
Confirming that he is not sought by the Colombian authorities, he said that Cohoa had been released “to find his family”.
In the middle of a sea of ​​journalists in the airport terminal, Ochoa was welcomed by his relatives and embraces his daughter.
In 2001, Ochoa was transported by plane to the United States after being arrested in Colombia in 1999 with around 30 other alleged traffickers.
He had already served a prison sentence in Colombia in the early 90s for his role of one of the patterns of the Medellin cartel. With his brothers, he was the first great trafficker to go as part of a program that protected members of the extradition cartel in the United States if they had pleaded guilty to minor offenses in Colombia.
Ochoa and his brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested once again during the so-called millennium on his involvement in cocaine smuggling affairs in the United States in the late 1990s.
In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to over 30 years before an American court for his involvement in the cartel which brought an average of 30 tonnes of cocaine in the United States each month between 1997 and 1999.
During the 1980s, he was one of the best operators in the Medellin Ring in Escobar, a supplier in its peak of 80% of the American cocaine market.
The late Medellin Cartel, with the Cali cartel, was one of the most powerful and dreaded drug networks of the 1980s.
His violent bombing and assassinations campaigns led to drug suspects between Colombia and the United States to suspend, before being resumed in 1997.
