CARACAS, Venezuela -- One of
Colombia's most-wanted alleged drug lords changed his appearance through
repeated plastic surgeries before he was captured in Venezuela while
making a call from a public payphone, Venezuela's justice minister said
Wednesday.
Daniel Barrera was handcuffed as he
was led from a truck to a waiting helicopter Wednesday to be flown from
the southwestern city of San Cristobal to the Venezuelan capital of
Caracas.
The 50-year-old Barrera was captured
Tuesday after Colombian officials, who had been working with U.S. and
British authorities, notified Venezuela that Barrera was making a call
from one of dozens of public phones being monitoring in the area,
Venezuelan Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said at a news conference.
The
arrest of the man known as "El Loco," or "The Madman," was announced
Tuesday evening by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who called
Barrera "the last of the great capos."
Barrera
had been in Venezuela since 2008 and owned ranches worth millions of
dollars, Colombia's National Police director, Gen. Jose Roberto Leon,
said at a news conference in Washington.
Leon
said Barrera had been posing as a cattle rancher and when detained was
carrying a fake passport with the name Jose Tomas Lucumi that also said
he was a resident of the Colombian city of Cali.
The
Colombian police chief thanked Venezuelan authorities for their
cooperation in capturing Barrera. Officials said the man was alone and
didn't resist when he was arrested at the payphone in front of a church
in San Cristobal.
Leon said the British
intelligence service MI-6 had provided "special training and technology"
that helped make the capture possible. He said he had traveled to
MI-6's headquarters last week, and that on Tuesday he went to
Washington, where he received "another important contribution" from the
CIA that allowed authorities to launch the operation to capture Barrera.
Various
informants helped the authorities find Barrera, and a reward of about
$2.5 million will be paid, Leon said. He noted that U.S. authorities had
also offered $5 million for information leading to his arrest.
U.S.
and Colombian officials have alleged that Barrera's gang supplies
cocaine to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, which ships drugs to the United
States.
El Aissami called it Venezuela's "most
important blow" against drug trafficking to date and said Venezuelan
authorities had been monitoring 69 public payphones since Colombia
alerted them Aug. 6 that Barrera was thought to be in the area.
U.S.
officials have frequently accused Venezuelan authorities of not doing
enough to curb drug trafficking, and have said that most of the drug
flights ferrying cocaine northward from South America leave from
Venezuela.
U.S.-Venezuelan counter-drug
cooperation has been sharply scaled back since 2005, when Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez suspended cooperation with the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration and accused it of being a front for
espionage.
Venezuelan government officials
said Barrera's arrest shows their commitment to counter-drug efforts. El
Aissami also criticized a recent report by President Barack Obama's
government that accused Venezuela of failing to meet its obligations in
fighting the drug trade.
"Without the
interference of the United States, we've detained ... 91 bosses of
important criminal organizations" in recent years, El Aissami said. He
didn't refer to the U.S. assistance that Leon described in Barrera's
case.
The arrest was the latest of several in
Venezuela involving alleged Colombian drug kingpins. The arrests have
followed improved Colombian relations with Venezuela under Santos.
Colombian leaders have also welcomed Venezuela's help in facilitating
peace talks in Norway next month between Colombia's government and the
country's biggest rebel movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC.
Venezuelan criminologist
Fermin Marmol Garcia said Venezuela was showing signs it was cracking
down on the drug trade by working with Colombian authorities, as well as
receiving help, if indirectly, from Britain and the United States.
Still, he said, it's clear Venezuela has become a key conduit for
cocaine shipments in the past decade.
"It
worries me to see so many international fugitives of justice in our
territory," Marmol said in a telephone interview. He said they seem to
"think Venezuela is a safe territory for them to keep cool, that it's a
safe territory for them to protect themselves."
He
said the authorities still need to do more to root out Barrera's
lieutenants. "He must have had deputies. He must have had properties,
places that should be raided," Marmol said.
According
to a 2010 grand jury indictment in U.S. District Court in New York,
Barrera was both manufacturing and trafficking drugs on a large scale,
buying raw cocaine paste from FARC rebels and converting it into cocaine
at his labs in eastern Colombia. The indictment said that amounted to
as much as 400 tons per year, and that Barrera then arrangement shipment
of the drugs through Colombia and Venezuela to the United States,
Europe and Africa.
Barrera had undergone
various cosmetic surgeries that helped him hide his identity, El Aissami
said, without giving details of those operations.
Colombian
authorities also released a photograph purportedly showing Barrera's
hands with the fingertips burned and blackened by acid in order to do
away with his fingerprints. It was unclear when the photograph was
taken.
El Aissami said Barrera would be interrogated by investigators in Caracas.
Associated Press