Colombia has extradited a reputed drug kingpin who acknowledged smuggling planeloads of cocaine into the US and said he would be relieved to enter a US jail after receiving death threats from rival traffickers.
US Drug Enforcement Administration agents transported Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamante to New York on Thursday. He was deported almost six months ago from Cuba, where he fled in 2004 to escape a US$5 million bounty for his capture by Washington.
Gomez, whose Norte del Valle cartel is believed to account for as much as 60 percent of the cocaine consumed in the US, was among the world's 10 drug traffickers most wanted by the US.
In an interview broadcast just before his extradition, Gomez told RCN TV that at his height he smuggled planeloads of cocaine containing as much as 10 tonnes a night to the US. Much of the cocaine was supplied by Salvatore Mancuso, the now-jailed leader of the umbrella organization for Colombia's powerful right-wing militias, he said.
Gomez said Cuban authorities tried to coerce him into slandering Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, offering to remove him from a dungeon-like cell where he was held if he accused Uribe of ties to the right-wing militias, but that he refused.
Gomez is the most powerful cartel leader to be sent to the US for trial since Uribe extradited the brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orjuela, who led the now-defunct Cali cartel, in December 2004.
Since taking office in 2002, Uribe has extradited more than 600 suspected drug traffickers, the majority of them to the US, which provides the Andean nation with more than US$700 million a year in anti-narcotics and counterinsurgent aid.
Gomez was televised on Thursday wearing a bulletproof vest and flanked by heavily armed police as a Black Hawk helicopter brought him to a Bogota air base from a maximum security prison.
He was arrested with a false passport as he arrived at Havana's international airport in 2004, setting off a delicate three-way diplomatic dance, with Colombia acting as an intermediary between the US and Cuba to secure his deportation and eventual extradition.
Gomez said his Cuban interrogators tried to force him to slander the conservative Uribe.
"They asked me several times whether I knew if Uribe had ties to the paramilitaries," Gomez told RCN TV. "I was very clear and told them just like they love their country, I love mine too."
Gomez pleaded for a speedy extradition, saying he received numerous death threats in jail from rival traffickers who fear he will testify against them.
During the RCN interview, he cried while promising to cooperate with US authorities in hopes of being reunited with his daughter.
Gomez said that among his business partners during 25 years of drug smuggling was Mancuso, the jailed leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary umbrella group.
He said he also bought cocaine from the main leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
"We always said we hated the guerrillas, but when we had to buy drugs we bought it from them," he said.
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