16 April,2009 10:58 AM IST | | Agncies
| Police officers escort Colombian drug trafficker Daniel Rendon Herrera at a police airport in Bogota yesterday. Rendon, alias Don Mario, was arrested in the northern Colombian city of Apartado in a raid involving 300 police.Pic/AP |
Police in the South American state have arrested the trafficker Daniel Rendon who has exported hundreds of tons of cocaine to the Mexican drug cartels and networks feeding the UK.
He was caught near the town of Apartado near his jungle base in the northern province of Antioquia, by a task force led by the national police chief General Oscar Naranjo.
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The region, near the Panamanian border, was turned into a personal fiefdom by Don Mario, from which he despatched his private army the 'Gaitanista Self-Defence Forces of Colombia' to take over the drugs trade along stretches of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.
"We have been after Don Mario for over a year and been so close several times," said a high ranking source in the police.
"This time we had solid intelligence, 300 police standing by and a bit of luck."
Don Mario's gunmen, up to 1,000 heavily armed fighters, have spread out from the north west of Colombia absorbing smaller drug gangs or destroying those that stood in their way, even challenging for control of Medellin, once home to the cartel of Pablo Escobar, an epicentre in the cocaine trade.
Like Escobar, who was killed in 1993, Don Mario had offered a bounty of $1,000 for every policeman killed, forcing the police to wear bullet proof jackets in the northern province where he ruled.
