The new Escobar? This is the head of the Colombian cartel arrested Israel today

Colombian police today (Sunday) arrested Dario Antonio Osuga, head of the Clan del Golfo cartel, one of the country's largest drug traffickers and producers, in an arrest that began with a media blitz headed by Colombian President Ivan Duca.

"This is the biggest blow inflicted against drug trafficking in the current century," the president said in a speech delivered on all the country's news networks.

"It can only be compared to the fall of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s," the president said.

Indeed, this is a particularly significant capture. Usuga, nicknamed the 50-year-old Othoniel, is one of the heads of the country's largest cartels.

A former activist in the Marxist terrorist organization Park, he is suspected of killing dozens of police and soldiers and exporting drugs to Mexico and the United States.

The Nebo organization was a member, the Clan del Golfo, also operated as a right-wing guerrilla organization and terrorized the remote and rural area from which it operated.

 Othoniel's importance was also embodied in the awards offered on his head.

Colombia offered a reward of up to 3 billion pesos (about $ 800,000) for information on the whereabouts of the drug cartel leader, while the US offered $ 5 million for help locating it.

Usuga is handcuffed after arrest, Photo: Reuters

However, some would question the branding of Osuga's capture as "the biggest since Pablo Escobar's capture. Inflated.

The comparison between the guerrilla man and the head of the cartel captured today to figures like Pablo Escobar or Hilberto Rodriguez Urban, the infamous Cali cartel head misses the great change that has taken place in the past decades in the configuration of the country’s organized crime world.

If in the past the center of gravity of drug production and distribution was in Colombia itself from which cocaine was smuggled directly to the United States, today the criminal organizations that mediate between the American market and towers in Colombia and Peru have risen to prominence, and are mostly in Mexico.

Organizations like the Halisco cartel and the Siniloa cartel are the twenty-first century equivalent of Pablo Escobar's criminal organization while organizations like Usuga's occupy a secondary place on the crime map in South and Central America.

It is difficult to compare the level of power, money and control in the political system held by people like Pablo Escobar and the heads of the Cali cartel in the 1980s and 1990s.