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 News from Around the Americas | February 2008 
Colombian Drug Kingpin Gets 30 Years
 West Australian
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| | Colombian drug kingpin Wilber Varela, who was killed in Venezuela, is seen in this undated file photo. The boss of Colombia's biggest remaining cocaine cartel was killed by gunfire in Venezuela in an apparent settling of accounts between drug gangs, Colombian security forces said on February 1, 2008. The body of Varela, known as "Jabon" or "Soap," was found on January 30 in a hotel room in Merida state in neighboring Venezuela, said a Colombian police source who asked not to be identified. (Reuters/National Police) | | |
A Colombian man who prosecutors called one of the world's most significant drug kingpins has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for money-laundering and smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the United States.
Manuel Felipe Salazar-Espinoza, also known as "Hoover," was convicted in June in federal court of heading an international drug trafficking ring that laundered millions of dollars and smuggled cocaine by the ton aboard speedboats between Colombia and Panama.
The drugs were then shipped to Mexico and smuggled into the United States.
Salazar-Espinoza was arrested in Colombia in 2005 and extradited to New York in August 2006.
Under terms of his extradition, US authorities assured Columbia Salazar-Espinoza, 58, would not be given a life sentence, prosecutors said.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Salazar-Espinoza had entered the narcotics trade "not because he knew of no other life," but because "it was a way to make even more money, vast amounts of money," according to a statement from the US Attorney's office.
"The only life the defendant knows is international drug trafficking," Kaplan said. But he declined to impose a sentence that would "inevitably be a life sentence."
Prosecutors said Salazar-Espinoza became connected to the international cocaine trade in the 1980s.
From 2002 to 2005, he conspired with Mexican cocaine cartel leaders to, each week, import "ton-quantities" of cocaine from Colombia to the United States and to launder $US12 million ($A13.4 million) to $US14 million in narcotics proceeds.
At the time of his arrest, Salazar-Espinoza was planning two shipments of cocaine to the United States that measured more than six tons, prosecutors said. |
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