Sebastián Marset, an alleged Uruguayan drug trafficker and one of South America’s most wanted criminals, has been arrested in Bolivia.
Marset, 34, is accused of trafficking tonnes of cocaine from South America to Europe, and also of having ordered the murder of a Paraguayan prosecutor who was shot dead as he honeymooned on a Colombian beach in 2022.
Marset was also wanted by Washington for allegedly laundering money through US banks, and Bolivia’s interior minister, Marco Antonio Oviedo, said on Friday that he was already being extradited to the US.
The arrest marks the end of Marset’s criminal career as the self-anointed “King of the South” – a moniker he had stamped on bricks of cocaine. It also signalled a return to law enforcement cooperation between Bolivia and the US under the centrist government of Rodrigo Paz, almost 20 years after his leftwing predecessor Evo Morales expelled both the US ambassador and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Marset was first arrested for drug trafficking in 2013 and spent years in prison in Uruguay, where he allegedly built connections with Primeiro Comando da Capital – the First Capital Command – one of Brazil’s most powerful organised crime groups, and Italy’s ’Ndrangheta mafia.
On his release in 2019 he moved to Paraguay on a fake Bolivian passport in the name of Gabriel de Souza Beuner, where he allegedly built the networks to traffic drugs from Bolivia, which is both a cocaine producer and key transit hub for Peruvian cocaine, and on to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
In 2021, Marset was detained in Dubai while travelling on a fake Paraguayan passport, only to leave the United Arab Emirates legally within days after Uruguayan authorities issued him a new passport. The resulting scandal led to the resignations of several Uruguayan officials.
But as investigators in various countries closed in on him, Marset moved to Bolivia in 2022, now using a Brazilian passport and the name Luis Paulo Amorim Santos.
Around this time, Marcelo Pecci, the Paraguayan prosecutor in charge of dismantling Marset’s network in that country, was murdered while on his honeymoon in Colombia. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, accused Marset of having ordered the assassination.
Meanwhile in Bolivia, Marset hid in plain sight. He bought a second-division football team and installed himself in its starting lineup, appearing in matches shown on local TV.
Yet when Bolivian authorities raided Marset’s mansion in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in July 2023, he was already gone, apparently tipped off ahead of time.
Marset had been on the run ever since, periodically posting videos in which he mocked Bolivian authorities, and even once flying a Uruguayan TV presenter in by helicopter to interview him in his hideout.
In the end, Bolivian police found him in the same city where he first eluded them two years ago.
