Dairo Antonio "Otoniel" Usuga David (15 September 1971-) was a Colombian drug lord and the leader of the Clan del Golfo neo-paramilitary group.
Biography[]
Dairo Antonio Usuga was born in Necocli, Uraba, Colombia in 1971. Raised in a remote, impoverished part of the country where cocaine traffickers, guerrillas, and paramilitaries were dominant, Usuga joined the communist EPL guerrilla group at the age of 18 before the group signed a peace with the government in 1991. Usuga promptly joined the far-right AUC paramilitary, and he and his brother Juan de Dios Usuga took control of the Clan del Golfo on the capture of Daniel Rendon Herrera in 2009. After his brother was killed in a police raid, "Otoniel" took full leadership of the drug trafficking group and became the most violent and significant Colombian drug trafficker since Pablo Escobar. In 2015, the government launched Operation Agamemnon to capture Usuga, dispatching 1,200 anti-drug police to search for him. In 2017, he offered to submit to a negotiated surrender, but the government refused to legitimize Usuga and instead intensified their search for him in 2021 following heightened levels of cocaine production. They were able to track him down by tailing cartel members who brought him medicine for his kidney disease, and he was captured in a raid involving hundreds of troops on the morning of 22 October 2021. He was extradited to the United States on 4 May 2022 and sentenced to 45 years in prison in August 2023.