Four alleged drug traffickers, one of them with presumed ties to extradited paramilitary warlord Salvatore Mancuso, were captured Monday by Colombian police in the cities of Medellin and Bogota.
In a joint operation between Colombian and U.S. authorities realized in Colombia’s second largest city Medellin, three presumed members of a transnational drug trafficking network transporting cocaine from Colombia to New York were captured.
According to the police, the suspects succeeded in transporting between 20 and 25 kilos of cocaine every month between Medellin and Colombia’s capital, Bogota. The drugs were then transported to the United States by couriers with U.S. citizenships.
All three were subject to extradition requests from courts in the U.S.
In a separate operation realized in Bogota, police reported the capture of a woman, alias “La Negra,” considered an important associate of the extradited ex-paramilitary warlord Salvatore Mancuso.
“During the decade of 2000 she led a group with the [paramilitary] Alvarez-Dueñas brothers who provided cocaine to the paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso and at the same time was entrusted with washing the money related to this illicit activity,” said the anti-narcotics director of the Colombian police, General Luis Alberto Perez Alvaran.
Barreto had arrest orders from a local court in the U.S. state of Virginia on charges of money laundering and drug trafficking.
The decision to extradite the woman to the United States was taken by Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office in June 2012.