A US court sentenced the founder of Colombia’s paramilitary organization AGC, to 35 years in prison on charges related to drug trafficking and terrorism.
The sentence comes almost a year after Daniel Herrera, a.k.a. “Don Mario,” pled guilty to leading a criminal enterprise and supporting terrorism as a member of the now-defunct AUC.
The court ruling was celebrated by District Attorney Breon Pearce from New York City, who claimed that Mario was “once the most feared narco-terrorist in Colombia.”
District Attorney Breon Pearce
Pearce said that his office “remains committed to cooperating with our international partners to dismantle transnational criminal organizations” 30 years after the DEA helped found paramilitary group “Los Pepes” to take down late drug Pablo Escobar.
Mario was a founding member of this group, which was led by the Castaño brothers that came from the same town as their future successor.
The former Pepes fighter played a key role in the paramilitaries’ expansion of Colombia’s cocaine trade, which was initially set up by the Medellin Cartel and their rivals from Cali.
The violence and terrorism used by Castaño brothers and their associates spurred the US State Department to declare the AUC a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.
Mario founded a dissident faction in 2006 as the result of tensions between the paramilitaries and former President Alvaro Uribe that escalated during the partial demobilization of the AUC between 2003 and 2006.
This faction would later become Colombia’s largest paramilitary organization and call itself the AGC.
Mario was arrested in 2009 already, however, and was extradited to the US in 2018.