Ignacio Álvarez Meyendorff was extradited from the Ezeiza airport (Argentina) on July 3, 2013 to the US.EFE
The Colombian Ignacio Álvarez Meyendorff spent Christmas night at the Ezeiza international airport in Buenos Aires.
Migrations detained him on Friday, December 23, after verifying that he had a "permanent ban on re-entry into Argentine territory" since June 2021. Álvarez Meyendorff, 62, had traveled from Bogotá, Colombia, to reunite with his family , but his record left him without celebration.
In 2011, Argentina extradited him to the United States, where he was tried for drug trafficking.
He had been living as a millionaire in Buenos Aires since 2004, until he fell for trying to send 253 kilos of cocaine to Europe hidden in stylish furniture.
The United States sentenced him in 2013 to seven years in prison for drug trafficking.
He served his sentence, but Argentina no longer wants him in his territory.
Álvarez Meyendorff has several aliases:
Mono, Nacho,
and
Big Brother
.
He was one of the biggest drug lords that he chose as a refuge in Argentina, a country that is out of the focus of the big organizations that fight against drug trafficking.
In Buenos Aires he lived in Puerto Madero, the neighborhood of the new rich in Argentina, with all his family.
Last Friday, he took an Avianca flight back from Colombia to meet with his wife and his four children, but in Ezeiza all the alarms went off.
Meyendorff has no pending cases in Argentina, but he does have a re-entry ban, despite having his entire family in Buenos Aires.
The lawyers played the health card before the judge: they presented a habeas corpus on the grounds that their client's diabetes required immediate hospitalization, but the doctors who examined him at Ezeiza found no major problems.
If everything follows its course, Meyendorff will be returned to Bogotá.
Migrations had already put him on the return plane, but the habeas corpus presented by his lawyers delayed the return operation.
Meyendorff took refuge in Argentina to protect his family, but he never gave up the business.
His mother, his wife and two of his children were sentenced in Buenos Aires for money laundering to between five and seven years in prison.
According to investigators, the clan laundered up to eight million dollars from the Norte del Valle cartel.
In this context, the drug lord was extradited to the United States, where he was convicted of "illicit association or criminal conspiracy to distribute" some 70 tons of cocaine in submarines from Colombia.
The organization had already received a blow in Argentina in 2012, in an operation called Luis XV in which more than 250 kilos of cocaine were kidnapped en route to Europe and the United States.
In 2011, the requisition of a sailboat that had drifted due to technical damage in the Río de la Plata found 444 kilos of drugs that also belonged to the clan.
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