A founder of the Medellin drug cartel has returned to Colombia after serving more than 20 years in prison in the United States for drug trafficking.

Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, 67, was deported by the U.S. government and arrived in Bogota on Monday as a free man.

Ochoa was a founding member of the notorious drug cartel and a top lieutenant to notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The Medellin cartel dominated the cocaine trade and waged violence against the Colombian government before Escobar was killed in 1993.

The country’s immigration agency said after Ochoa arrived in Bogota, immigration officials ran Ochoa’s fingerprints through a database.

The statement confirmed that Ochoa was not wanted by Colombian authorities and said Ochoa had been released “in order to reunite with his family.”

Amid a sea of ​​reporters at the airport terminal, Ochoa was greeted by his relatives and hugged his daughter.

Ochoa was arrested in Colombia in 1999 along with about 30 other alleged traffickers and subsequently flown to the United States in 2001.

He was imprisoned in Colombia in the early 1990s for serving as one of the leaders of the Medellín drug cartel. He and his brothers were the first major traffickers to turn themselves in under a program that protects cartel members from extradition to the United States if they plead guilty to misdemeanors in Colombia.

Ochoa and his brother were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again in the so-called “Operation Millennium” for his involvement in a cocaine smuggling operation in the United States in the late 1990s.

In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison by a U.S. court for his role in a drug cartel that shipped an average of 30 tons of cocaine to the United States each month from 1997 to 1999.

In the 1980s, he was one of the top operators of Escobar’s Medellin gang, which at its peak supplied 80 percent of the U.S. cocaine market.

The defunct Medellín and Cali Cartels were among the most powerful and feared drug networks of the 1980s.

Its campaign of violent bombings and assassinations led to the suspension of extraditions of drug suspects between Colombia and the United States, which were subsequently resumed in 1997.