Colombian security forces have captured the country’s most wanted drug smuggler; Deiro Antonio Osuga. He is a rural chieftain who escaped a decades-long search by corrupting state officials and associating himself with fighters on the left and right.

President Ivan Duque on Saturday compared the arrest of Deiro Antonio Osuga to the arrest of Pablo Escobar three decades ago

Images going viral on social media show Osuga handcuffed and his face resting on the ground.

Suga, known as his alias Otoniel, is the alleged chief of the much-maligned Gulf Clan, whose army of assassins has terrorized much of northern Colombia, stretching from north to Central America and into the Americas. To gain control of major cocaine smuggling routes through the forests.

He has long been a fixture on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most wanted fugitives, for whose capture it was offering a $5m reward. He was first indicted in Manhattan federal court in 2009 on drug charges and for allegedly providing aid to a far-right paramilitary group designated a terrorist organization by the US government.

But like many of his gunmen, he has also been cycling through the ranks of several guerrilla groups, most recently claiming to lead Colombia’s Gatnist Self-Defense Forces after the Colombian left-wing firebrand in the mid-20th century.

He also faces criminal charges in the Miami Tampa and Brooklyn federal courts.

Officials said intelligence provided by the US and Britain led more than 500 soldiers and members of Colombian special forces to Osuga’s jungle hideout, which was protected by eight rings of security.

Suga flew under the radar of the authorities for years, escaping the high profile of Colombia’s better known narcotics.

He and his brother, who were killed in a raid in 2012, got their start as gunfighters for the now defunct leftist guerrilla group, popularly known as the Liberation Army, and then later switched sides. And the rebels were joined by Battlefield Enemies, a right-wing paramilitary group.

When that militia signed a peace treaty with the government in 2006, they refused disarmament, instead delving deeper into Colombia’s criminal underworld and setting up operations in the strategic Gulf of Uraba region in northern Colombia, which is located in the Pacific. There was a major drug corridor bounded by the ocean and the Caribbean Sea on both sides.

A network of safe houses in leeks and rural homes allowed them for years to resist a scorched-earth campaign by the military against the Gulf Clan. But the war was taking a toll on the 50-year-old fugitive, who insisted on sleeping on an orthopedic mattress to minimize back injuries while on the run. In 2017, he showed his face for the first time on the occasion of Pope Francis’ visit to the country, publishing a video in which he asked his group to lay down their arms and allow them to demilitarize as part of the country’s peace process.