The Ochoa brothers, partners of Pablo Escobar at the origin of paramilitarism in Colombia

Pablo Escobar would not have been able to create the most dangerous and bloodthirsty cartel ever created in Colombia, that of Medellin. He did so in the company of three brothers belonging to a family of enterprising farmers: Juan David, Jorge Luis and Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, who ended up becoming the founders of paramilitarism in Colombia after the kidnapping from a sister.

The Ochoa brothers were the sons of Fabio Ochoa Restrepo and Margot Vásquez, horse breeders. From an early age, they dropped out of school to earn money, first through legal channels. Jorge Luis emigrated to the United States looking for more luck and that's when he met the world of drug trafficking. It was he who had the connections needed for sending cocaine from Colombia, for the criminal enterprise that quickly handled the jungle networks in North American country. .

With the growing drug consumption in the United States, the Medellín cartel was eventually created in 1978, capable of processing 80% of the world's cocaine. And Jorge Luis included in the multi-billion dollar company his two younger brothers, to form the Ochoa Clan, second in command after Escobar. They became one of the richest men in Colombia, while maintaining a facade of Kabbalists, landowners and prosperous merchants.

They have never been recognized as the most violent, role that other drug traffickers in the country have played effortlessly. But it is they who eventually found the basis of paramilitarism, which is attributed to 94,754 dead during the armed conflict between 1958 and July 2018, according to figures from the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH). Even a lot more than those registered by the guerrillas, who are 35,683.

It all started on November 12, 1981. Martha Nieves Ochoa Vásquez, 26, was leaving school at the University of Antioquia, where she had studied economics before being caught. by men who had forced her to enter a Renault 12 orange. She was the sister of drug traffickers Ochoa. And the kidnappers belonged to the leftist group M-19, and then to the guerrilla group, which had the most urban presence, because of the very origin of its foundation, which took place in the cities. They asked for $ 1.2 million worth of time for their release.

At that time, the increased number of kidnappings, robberies and guerrilla immunization payments to landowners and ranchers had generated widespread unrest. And the abduction of Martha was the trigger for a more powerful player, drug traffickers, to join this sector. On December 1, 1981, the Ochoa brothers convened an urgent meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel in Medellin, to which 223 people attended to discuss how they would defend themselves against the insurgency.

The media of the time, even, said that members of the national army and directors of oil companies and multinationals had attended the meeting. The truth is that that day, each drug dealer donated $ 640 and 10 men to form a private army of 2,230 men, called MAS (Kidnappers). For the sole purpose of murder any person related or believed to be related to the insurgency. The war in the country has changed course.

The presentation of MAS in the country was typical of the eccentricities of drug traffickers. When the Colombian football final was played at Pascual Guerrero stadium in Cali, a clbadic between America (owned by the Cali cartel) and the Nacional (owned by the Medellin cartel), a small plane flew over the square and dropped a rain of leaflets. with a statement of 11 points in which the creation of the self-defense group was explained.

The first action of MAS was the abduction of 25 people close to Luis Gabriel Bernal Villegas, the guerrilla who planned and ordered the abduction of Martha Ochoa; among them his wife Martha Correa Velázquez. This put pressure on the group of guerrillas who, after 92 days of captivity, released their hostage without receiving a single reward peso. While Correa was released in front of the newspaper El Colombiano, of Medellín, bound hand and foot.

But the actions of the self-defense group did not stop there. On the contrary, it has spread to other parts of the country, such as Magdalena Medio, where the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia were born, in the hands of the brothers Castaño, Meta, Arauca, Casanare and Valle del Cauca. And the national newspaper pages were full of information about the torture, disappearances and murders of any guerrilla sympathizers or suspected of having been.

Dozens of M-19 leaders have been tortured by the MAS and "social cleansing" has spread throughout the insurgency. It is this self-defense group that unleashed the genocide of the Patriotic Union (UP), a leftist political party formed as part of a peace proposal from several guerrilla groups such as the FARC, the EPL and the ELN. More than 300 UP leaders were murdered, including two presidential candidates, Jaime Pardo Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa. And the group ended up ridding people, simply because of their political ideology, that they had never had a weapon in their hands.

The proliferation of self-defense groups was such that during the Virgilio Barco government, there were already some 264 of them nationwide; according to the magazine Week. Until Carlos Castaño gathers all the members of the United Autodefensas de Colombia (AUC) and changes his name so that he is clearly counter-insurgent.

The Ochoa brothers were also part of the "extraditable", complained by drug traffickers opposed to the extradition treaties with the United States in a war to the death led by Pablo Escobar. But in the 1990s, the conflict with the Cali cartel and the persecution of the DEA and the Colombian authorities eventually squeezed the clan.

At that time, President Cesar Gaviria put in place a decree guaranteeing non-extradition, reduction of sentences and impartial judgment to all drug traffickers who voluntarily surrendered to justice. The Ochoa brothers took advantage of this policy and eventually surrendered.

Jorge Luis was the first to surrender on January 15, 1991, sentenced to 8 years and 4 months in prison. He has served less than six years in prison and is still free and alive. Juan David followed him in February 1991 and was sentenced to five years in prison. He lived well until July 2013, when he died in Medellín following a heart attack.

For his part, Fabio, the youngest brother, preferred to continue cocaine trafficking with Escobar. Until his capture in 1999 and his extradition to the United States in 2001, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The murder of Barry Seal, a former Medellin Cartel pilot who became a DEA informant, was reported; and conspiring to smuggle 30 tonnes of cocaine into North America between 1997 and 1999.