Colombia’s notorious “El Loco Barrera” has been indicted by the U.S. for trafficking “up to 400 tons of cocaine per year,” said an indictment from a United States court Friday.
Considered the country’s most important drug leader of the last decade, the recently captured Daniel “El Loco” Barreras held a U.S. bounty on his head of five million dollars, the same amount as Osama Bin Laden, and could face life in prison for charges of drug trafficking and money laundering from three different U.S. courts in both Florida and New York.
The most detailed charges of the “last of the great Capos,” whom the U.S. deemed a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker, came from the Southern New York Court, its indictment stating that he produced “at least approximately 30,000 kilograms of cocaine powder in his Llanos base laboratories” per month, equaling about 400 tons of cocaine per year.
The indictment also states that El Loco was the cocaine production link between FARC, Colombia’s largest rebel guerrilla group that made the cocaine base, and paramilitary group AUC, whom he paid for both maintaining his cocaine labs and providing safe passage to Venezuela.
The massive amounts of cocaine that Barrera was responsible for trafficking summed up to approximately $30 million per week, therefore generating $12 billion worth of cocaine every year.
The drug trafficker was caught Tuesday in Venezuela while making a phone call and must be extradited before being prosecuted.