After
Colombia Plea by Brother of
Petro Party Senator Now US
Requests 210 Months
by
Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book
Substack
SDNY
COURTHOUSE,
April 19 – The narco
trafficking brother of a
Colombian senator in the party
of President Gustavo Petro
pled guilty on January 2, 2024
to a guideline sentence of 210
to 262 months.
Petro has spoken
publicly of no long
extraditing drug trafficking
suspects to the US if they
agree to stop
trafficking.
Alvaro Fredy
Cordoba Ruiz was extradited in
January 2023 to the U.S.
District Court for the
Southern District of New York,
where he was assigned a
Criminal Justice Act lawyer
and detained on consent. His
extradition from Colombia had
taken more than a year.
A
superseding indictment was
filed in February 2023 and on
January 2, 2024 he pled
guilty, stating that between
July 2021 and February 2022,
he agreed with others to send
500 grams or more of cocaine
to the United States.
"I knew
that the cocaine would end up
in the United States and I
knew what I was doing was
wrong," he said in a scripted
statement. He is the brother
of Senator Piedad Cordoba of
Petro's Pacto Historico party.
Sentencing was set for April
11 at 2 pm.
Petro has
been mentioned in another SDNY
case Inner City Press is
covering, that of Hugo "El
Pollo" Carvajal.
On March 22
co-defendant Alberto Alonso
Jaramillo Ramirez was, the day
after his extradition in from
Colombia, presented before
SDNY Magistrate Judge Gary
Stein. Inner City Press was
there, the only media in the
SDNY Mag Court.
Ramirez had
been indicted on cocaine
importation and machine gun
charges. But it emerged that
Colombia had only extradited
him on the cocaine counts, and
so the machine gun charges,
like those on which former
Honduras President Juan
Orlando Hernandez was
convicted earlier in the
month, would in this case be
dropped.
The day's
CJA lawyer, from a large law
firm based in New Jersey,
consented to detention.
On April 12
another large firm defense
lawyer for Alvaro Fredy
Cordobo Ruiz asked that he be
sentenced to 60 months or five
years. They note that another
defendant "extradited on the
same plane as Alvaro from
Colombia" got 96 months.
On April 19, the
US Attorney's Office wrote in
requesting on Alvaro
Fredy Cordobo
Ruiz 210
months, with
sentencing set
for April 26.
The overall case
is US v. Cordoba Ruiz, et al.,
22-cr-121 (Liman)
***
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