Drug lord Fabio Ochoa Vasquez was released from a US prison, deported to Colombia, and released.

One of Colombia's drug lords and a the main operator of the Medellin cartel has been fired and sent back in the South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.

After a while, Fabio Ochoa became a free man again.

Ochoa arrived at Bogota's El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday, wearing a gray shirt and carrying his belongings in a plastic bag. After exiting the plane, the former cartel boss was met by immigration officials wearing bulletproof vests. There are no police officers on site to arrest him.

Colombia's national immigration agency quickly posted a brief statement on social media platform X, saying Ochoa was “released to be able to join his family” after immigration officials took his fingerprints and confirmed on a website that he was not wanted by Colombian authorities.

Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune during the cocaine boom in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to US authorities, so much so that in 1987 they were included on Forbes Magazine's list of billionaires.

Living in Miami, Ochoa had a cocaine cartel distribution center that he once led Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellín in 1993.

Ochoa was first indicted in the US for his alleged involvement in the 1986 murder of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine planes for a Medellin-based company but became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s under a deal that avoided extradition to the US.

The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was rearrested three years later for drug trafficking and extradited to the US in 2001 in response to an indictment filed in Miami naming him and more than 40 people as part of a drug-trafficking conspiracy. .

He was the only suspect in that group who chose to go to court, which resulted in him being sentenced to 30 years. Some defendants received very light sentences because most of them cooperated with the government.

Ochoa's name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade.

But the former member of the Medellin cartel was recently featured in the Netflix series Griselda, where he begins a fight with businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of the Miami cocaine market and forms an alliance with a drug trafficker, played by Sofia Vergara.

Ochoa is also featured in the The Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite Medellin family working in the breeding and breeding of horses and cutting a big difference with Escobar, who came from very humble roots.

Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities have never been able to seize all of the Ochoa family's illegal drug money and he expects the former mafia boss will be willing to return home.

“He's not going to retire poor, that's for sure,” Gregory told The Associated Press earlier this month.