Brutal Drug Kingpin Killed, Colombia says

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Wednesday that ruthless drug lord Pedro Guerrero, alias “Cuchillo” (Knife), was killed last week in a clash with police. “The murderer of murderers fell. We were on his trail for many years. He had become a kind of legend who was unreachable,” Santos told a press conference where he was joined by Colombia’s top cop, Gen. Oscar Naranjo.


People who provided information about Guerrero’s whereabouts will receive the $2.5 million reward authorities posted for his capture, the president said. Guerrero, also wanted by U.S. authorities, died in a Christmas Day police operation in an area along the border between the southern Colombian provinces of Meta and Guaviare. It was only Wednesday that medical examiners were able to definitively identify the body of Cuchillo, a drug lord whose armed militia killed some 3,000 people and forced scores of peasants off their land. Guerrero perished clutching “the knife with which he slit the throats of his victims,” Santos said.

Two police officers also died in last week’s battle, while eight members of Guerrero’s self-styled Anti-terrorist Popular Revolutionary Army of Colombia were arrested. Cuchillo began his criminal career working for the late Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the military chief of the now-defunct Medellin drug cartel, and later joined the Centauros Bloc of the since-disbanded AUC federation of right-wing militias. The successful operation shows that “there is no one who escapes the forcefulness, courage and determination” of Colombia’s police and armed forces, Santos said. Separately, Colombian police said Wednesday that they seized 6.4 tons of cocaine in Buenaventura, the country’s main port on the Pacific. The drugs were found inside shipping containers at warehouses in the port, police Gen. Cesar Augusto Pinzon said, describing the seizure as a “harsh blow” to the organization led by Daniel Barrera. The criminals planned to move the cocaine out of the port in speedboats and then load the U.S.-bound drugs onto a larger vessel offshore.