Last Friday, Colombian authorities arrested one of the most notorious drug criminals in history, Carlos Lehder. The drug lord arrived in Bogota on a KLM Boeing 787-10, after a flight from Frankfurt with a layover in Amsterdam.
KLM flight KL741 landed at El Dorado Airport in Bogota at 2:26 PM local time. Upon exiting the plane, the 77-year-old Lehder was immediately arrested by Colombian police. A photo shows Lehder, surrounded by two officers.
Lehder was a key figure in the Medellín cartel. In 1987, he purchased an island in the Bahamas from where he organised cocaine and marijuana transports. On February 4th of that year, he was arrested and extradited to the United States. He was sentenced to life in prison, but after 33 years, he was released after a deal with Federal justice.
Since his release in 2020, Lehder had been living in Germany. He likely did not anticipate that Colombian authorities still had an investigation pending against him. He remained on the wanted list for drug offences and arms trafficking.
Escobar
In the 1980s, Lehder, along with Pablo Escobar, led the cocaine smuggling operations to the United States and Western Europe. The Medellín cartel established smuggling routes through Suriname and the Antilles, with Amsterdam as a key hub. From the Dutch capital, the cartel distributed cocaine throughout Europe.
As pressure from the United States on Escobar increased in the late 1980s, the two started focussing more on Western Europe. The Medellín cartel was one of the first criminal organisations to introduce cocaine on a large scale in many Western European countries.