Leonidas Vargas

Leonidas Vargas Vargas (May 13, 1949 – January 8, 2009), also known as "El Viejo" and "The King of Caqueta", was a Colombian drug lord who headed a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire associated with the Medellín Cartel and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Vargas became one of the richest drug lords in Colombia, as well as one of the most wanted by police.

In 1995 Vargas began serving a six-year prison term, during which he survived an assassination attack when his rivals set off a bomb at his jail. In 2006, he was again arrested in Madrid for cocaine trafficking. While awaiting a trial on those charges, Vargas was killed on January 8, 2009, when he was shot to death in a hospital bed.

Biography In his early life, Leonidas Vargas was a poor and little-educated meat vendor in the rural region of Caqueta, a southern region of Colombia. He eventually became associated with drug lords José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar, the wealthy and powerful leader of the Medellín Cartel. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Vargas ran a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire that included a network of large cocaine-processing laboratories deep in the jungles of Caqueta. The mass-produced cocaine was then exported to the United States of America. Vargas has been accused of organizing hit squads of hired killers,

Spanish police arrested Vargas in Madrid in July 2006 on charges of trafficking of cocaine, which had been discovered in a container in the port of Valencia in eastern Spain. On October 25, 2009, 24-year-old Jonathan Andrew O. was arrested in Madrid for allegedly committing the murder itself. He was arrested at the Madrid-Barajas Airport after a flight from the Colombian city Cali.