With the arrest of Elkin Triana, Colombian authorities hope to have ended the hegemony of a Medellin crime family that rose to power together with Pablo Escobar.
The Triana gang was one of the enforcer armies of Escobar in the 1980s and has since been part of La Oficina, the crime syndicate that has controlled much of Medellin’s underworld for more than 30 years.
Its founder, a.k.a. “El Patron,” “was the main driving force behind drug trafficking links” in Medellin and the surrounding Aburra Valley, National Police director General Jorge Nieto told media.
The brothers Elkin and John Fredy Triana, and their cousin Carlos Mario founded their gang in the Santa Cruz district and have been in and out of prison since.
Elkin, a.k.a. “El Patron,” was surprisingly released in 2011, and allegedly led the “supercombo” of hundreds of gangsters until his arrest on Sunday in a luxury villa in Amaga, a town 20 miles south of Medellin.
The arrest of El Patron is the second mayor blow against La Oficina within a year; with last year’s arrest of “Tom” the authorities already claimed to have captured the chief executive of Medellin’s criminal board of executives.
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El Patron was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1999 after a judge found him guilty of ordering the massacre of six people in Bello, a city bordering Medellin in the north. He was released 12 years later.
On two prior occasions, the senior crime boss escaped prison.
The arrest of Tom, El Patron and Lindolfo, the husband of a famous TV host, are major trophy’s for Mayor Federico Gutierrez who promised to combat La Oficina since taking office in 2016.
The arrests, however, are causing unrest in Medellin’s underworld. Las Oficina has proven to be able to quickly replace arrested bosses, but never without deadly force.