One of the world's most-hunted drug traffickers - whose organisation compared in size to that of late drug lord Pablo Escobar - has been arrested in Brazil after a decade on the run.
Pablo Rayo-Montano was captured on Tuesday at his home in Sao Paulo as part of a three-year operation spearheaded by the US Drug Enforcement Agency and police in Brazil, Panama and Colombia.
More than three dozen others were arrested during simultaneous raids in the United States and Latin America, officials said. Also seized were three islands owned by Rayo-Montano off the coast of Panama and a trove of expensive artwork, yachts, real estate holdings and millions in cash.
The cartel allegedly used speedboats, cargo vessels and submarine-like vessels to ship more than 15 tonnes of cocaine a month from clandestine Colombian ports to the United States and Europe, officials said.
'The Rayo-Montano trafficking organisation ranked up there with Pablo Escobar and the Cali cartel in terms of the amount of cocaine it was able to smuggle into the United States,' said Dave Gaddis, head of the DEA in Bogota, Colombia.
Escobar, history's most notorious drug trafficker, led the now defunct Medellin cocaine cartel and was shot dead by police in December 1993. Much of the drug trafficking industry was subsequently taken over by Colombia's Cali Cartel.
The latest operation targeted the network allegedly run by Jackson Orozco-Gil and the brothers Domingo and Mars Micolta-Hurtado from Colombia's Caribbean coast. All three were arrested on Tuesday in Colombia and Panama.