Lehder, 75, arrived in Bogotá on a commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, a country of which he is also a citizen and where he resides since 2020.
“Migration Colombia made available to the Colombian police to Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, Excel of the Medellín cartel. Lehder Rivas, who arrived in the country from Frankfurt, presented in our information systems a current capture order ”that institution reported in its X account.
Police did not report for which crime the old drug trafficking capo has in force in the country.
Lehder, was captured in Colombia in February 1987 and extradited shortly thereaf In 2020, when they were releasedhe chose to be deported to Germany, instead of Colombia.
“We verify Lehder’s judicial situation. At the moment we are transferring to a police unit of Bogotá to the once capo of the extinct Cartel of Medellín, Carlos Lehder Rivas, to verify his judicial situation in Colombia,” said the director of the Colombian Police, General Carlos Fernando Triana in X.
Lehder, from German father, was born in 1949 in Armenia, capital of the department of Quindío, in the center of the country, and in the 70s and 80s He was one of the main partners of the Medellín Pablo Escobar poster.
How Carlos Lehder operated
With a flotilla of airplanes, it was responsible for organizing the transport of cocaine to Miami, using Cayo Norman, a small island of the Bahamas in which it bought several properties, including an airstrip.
Over the years Lehder became one of the largest drug trafficking capos by sending tons of cocaine to the United States.
Due to his collaboration with the US authorities when he was imprisoned, Lehder was included in a witness protection program and declared in the process against Panamanian ex -dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega.
The eccentricities
The accumulated economic power allowed him to infiltrate the police and acquire large estates in Colombia, mainly in the center of the country and in the eastern plains.
In one of those properties, called ‘La Posada German’, Lehder, very fond of music of The Beatles, ordered to install a statue of his idol, John Lennon, represented naked, with a guitar in his hands and a German town of World War II.
In addition to the assets I had in Colombia, Lehder also bought properties in the United States, Bahamas and Brazil.
In 1978, in the rise of his power, he offered the then president of Colombia, Alfonso López Michelsen, paying the country’s external debt in exchange for a free space for drug trafficking.
However, his empire collapsed in 1987 when he was arrested and extradited to the United States, where he fulfilled part of his condemnation in a cell that was five floors under ground level. EFE