The head of the Devesa Clan is linked to the Ecuadorian boss who fell in Colombia. He is a 53-year-old Spaniard.
The business of a powerful Ecuadorian drug trafficker in Colombia turned the spotlight on his global chain of partners. And among them stands out a bloodthirsty Spanish ex-policeman, accused of controlling a million-dollar cocaine route that leaves our country and crosses West Africa.
The intrigue began on February 9 on the Pan-American highway, near Pasto. There the DEA and the Police arrested Wilder Emilio Sánchez Farfán, alias “el Gato Farfán”.
The fact was cataloged by President Guillermo Lasso as the strongest blow against Ecuadorian drug trafficking in recent times, since this extraditable had the capacity to export up to 6 tons of drugs per month and was wanted by multiple agencies.
The Prosecutor’s Office mentioned the chain of suppliers and clients of “El Gato Farfán”, who obtained the alkaloid from the crops and laboratories controlled by the Farc dissidents in Nariño and Cauca.
He negotiated exports to the US and Europe with his contacts from the Sinaloa cartel and the Devesa Clan. Of the first group, of Mexican origin, enough is already known in Colombia; but the others, with roots in Spain, who are they?
Blood, corruption and coke
The head of the organization is Miguel Ángel Devesa Mera, a 53-year-old former police officer. His history is scattered in judicial and press archives of the Old Continent.
Born in Galicia, he worked in the Vigo Police until 2002, when he was expelled for possession of cocaine and the theft of an ecstasy package that had been seized.
Later he was linked to the cartel of José Prado (“Sito Miñanco”), one of the most famous capos in Spain, who entrusted him with the administration of his affairs in Africa, in the company of Colombian partners.
Devesa settled in Mali in 2008, posing as a real estate investor.
He linked several of his family and friends in the business, secretly coordinating a cocaine route that acquired the drug from the FARC in Colombia and exported it by air and sea from Venezuela.
The merchandise entered through the West African coast, where the Devesa Clan received and ordered it for its final distribution in Europe.
The house of cards began to collapse in 2009, when a Boeing 727 plane that had taken off from Venezuela, loaded with 10 tons of Colombian cocaine, crashed in the Mali desert. The gang managed to recover the drugs, but all the phone calls they made to coordinate this operation were intercepted by the Spanish Police.
This is how they “caught Devesa’s tail”, as they say in criminal slang. They followed him for months, until in October 2010 they raided a warehouse in the city of Bamako. At that time, the former police officer was with two henchmen dismembering one of his Colombian associates, named Juan Carlos García Soto (“Johny”), with an electric saw.
Devesa, with his bloody clothes, managed to say: “It is that we are slaughtering a lamb to celebrate Ramadan.” Nobody believed.
He was imprisoned and the following year, although unusual, he was released for apparent formal defects in the criminal process (read “corruption”).
Upon his return to the streets, he stopped working for others and established himself as the boss of his own organization. He established alliances with other drug traffickers, such as “El Gato Farfán” and the Farc, who continued to provide him with cocaine.
Luck turned its back on him again in April 2022, when he returned to jail because of another of his Colombian partners, Gustavo Valencia Sepúlveda. This man beat a prostitute in her apartment in the Ivory Coast, the woman reported him and when the police arrived they found 168 kilos of cocaine on the site.
In the interrogation room, Valencia confessed that the cache belonged to Devesa. The drug trafficker tried to flee, but a few hours later he was arrested along with his mother, his wife, and several of his henchmen.
Despite this, the flow of cocaine through the West African route has not diminished, according to intelligence sources, which is why they assume that the Devesa Clan is still active. The capture of “el Gato Farfán” in Pasto could be the clue to identify its new leader.