BRAZIL: Colombian drug lord arrested

Brazilian police arrested on Tuesday (August 7) a man said to be one of Colombia's most violent drug traffickers. He is also wanted by U.S.authorities over the shipping of thousands of tonnes of cocaine to the United States. Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia was seized around dawn at an apartment in Aldeia da Serra, Sao Paulo state, in an operation against an international smuggling and money-laundering ring, a federal police statement said. The U.S. State Department describes 44-year-old Ramirez Abadia - nicknamed "Chupeta", or "Lollipop" - as one of Colombia's most significant cocaine traffickers and a leader of the Cali-based Norte del Valle cartel. It says he is extremely violent and had offered a reward of up to 5 million U.S. dollars for information leading to his arrest. Police chief Fernando Fransischini said Ramirez Abadia is suspected of ordering the murders of hundreds of people in Colombia and the United States. "He has to answer to over three hundred homicides in Colombia and at least fifteen in the United States," he said. In a March 2004 indictment issued by a federal grand jury in Washington, Ramirez Abadia is accused of shipping about 500 tonnes of cocaine worth in excess of 10 billion U.S. dollars from Colombia to the United States between 1990 and 2004. In a news conference on Tuesday, Federal Police Superintendent Jader Saad compared Abadia to Pablo Escobar, one of the world's most famous drug traffickers, killed in 1993. "He took over the place of Pablo Escobar, so he would be considered today the greatest trafficker in South America or even in the world, because he would supply drugs to Europe and to the United States," he said. Saad also said the criminal had gone through a series of plastic surgeries. "It is amazing how he had the capacity to change his looks," he said. A federal police spokesman in Brasilia said the Supreme Court was processing a U.S. extradition request and if approved, Ramirez Abadia would be transferred to the United States. The U.S. government alleges Ramirez Abadia also smuggled thousands of tonnes of cocaine to Texas, California and New York in the mid-1990s, setting up a financial network using a Colombian pharmaceutical distribution company as a front.

ITN Source | August 8, 2007

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