Bolivia arrests alleged drug kingpin accused of putting hit on Paraguayan prosecutor | Bolivia
Sebastián Marset, an alleged Uruguayan drug trafficker and one of South America’s most wanted criminals, was arrested in Bolivia.
Marset, 34, is accused of smuggling tons of cocaine from South America to Europe, as well as ordering the murder of a Paraguayan prosecutor who was shot dead while honeymooning on the Colombian coast in 2022.
Marset was also wanted by Washington for alleged money laundering through US banks, as was Bolivian interior minister Marco Antonio Oviedo. he said on friday He was already being extradited to the USA.
The arrest marks the end of Marset’s criminal career as the self-proclaimed “King of the South”, a moniker he left his mark on bricks of cocaine. It also signaled a return to law enforcement cooperation between Bolivia and the United States under the centrist government of Rodrigo Paz, almost 20 years after his leftist predecessor Evo Morales expelled both the US ambassador and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Marset was first arrested for drug trafficking in 2013 and spent years in prison in Uruguay, where he allegedly established links with Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command), one of Brazil’s most powerful organized crime groups, and Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia.
When he was released in 2019, he moved to Paraguay with a fake Bolivian passport in the name of Gabriel de Souza Beuner; Here he allegedly established networks to smuggle drugs from Bolivia, which is both a cocaine producer and an important transit center for Peruvian cocaine, to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
Marset was detained in Dubai in 2021 while traveling with a fake Paraguayan passport, but was detained to legally leave the United Arab Emirates a few days later after Uruguayan authorities issued him a new passport. The resulting scandal led to the resignation of many Uruguayan officials.
But when investigators in various countries approached him, Marset moved to Bolivia in 2022 and now uses a Brazilian passport and the name Luis Paulo Amorim Santos.
Around this time, Marcelo Pecci, the Paraguayan prosecutor responsible for bringing down Marset’s network in that country, was murdered while on his honeymoon in Colombia. Colombian President Gustavo Petro marset accused for giving the order for the assassination.
Meanwhile, in Bolivia, Marset was hiding in plain sight. He bought a football team in the second division and entered the first 11, taking part in matches shown on local television.
But when Bolivian authorities raided Marset’s mansion in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in July 2023, Marset was already gone and apparently had been given advance notice.
Marset had been on the run ever since, regularly posting videos in which he taunted Bolivian officials and once even flew a Uruguayan TV presenter by helicopter to interview him at his hideout.
Finally, Bolivian police found him in the city he had first fled two years earlier.
