One of the most wanted drug kingpins in South America, Sebastian Enrique Marset Cabrera, has been arrested in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, after a morning raid involving hundreds of police officers.
Following Marset’s capture on Friday, Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz celebrated the arrest as a milestone in the fight against drug trafficking on the continent.
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“One of the drug traffickers and criminals considered among the four biggest on the continent has fallen,” Paz said during a news conference in La Paz, Bolivia.
“The capture of Mr Marset marks a turning point in the fight against organised crime, and it also reaffirms the government’s determination to confront international and domestic mafias.”
Paz’s leadership is part of a trend in South America, which has seen longtime left-leaning governments flounder in recent elections, in favour of right-wing alternatives.
Marset’s arrest also coincides with a renewed push from the United States to more aggressively address drug trafficking across the Western Hemisphere.
Paz’s nascent government has demonstrated a willingness to partner with the US on those efforts.
Paz was sworn into office in November, ending nearly 20 years of leadership from Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism (MAS), and in late February, his government reinstated ties with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after a rupture in 2008.
US President Donald Trump recently hosted Paz and other right-wing leaders from Latin America at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida to discuss shared efforts to combat drug cartels and other criminal networks.
One of Trump’s top advisers, Stephen Miller, reiterated the president’s hardline stance that drug traffickers should not be treated as criminals, but as unlawful combatants in an armed conflict.
“The cartels that operate in this hemisphere are the ISIS [ISIL] and the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere and should be treated just as brutally and just as ruthlessly as we treat those organisations,” Miller said.
“We have learned after decades of effort is that there is not a criminal justice solution to the cartel problem.”
After his arrest on Friday, Marset was transferred into US custody, and he was seen boarding a US-tagged plane.
The DEA did not participate in his capture, which was led by local law enforcement. No injuries or deaths were reported after the operation.
Who is Marset?
The DEA considered Marset, a 34-year-old Uruguayan citizen, to be “one of South America’s most notorious drug traffickers”.
On March 7, 2024, he was indicted on money laundering charges, for allegedly using US-based financial institutions to process millions in drug-trafficking proceeds.
The indictment also accused Marset of leading a transnational criminal group, the First Uruguayan Cartel, responsible for shipping cocaine across the world, including to destinations such as Belgium and Portugal.
One drug bust in the Belgian port of Antwerp turned up nearly 16 tonnes of cocaine linked to Marset’s criminal network.
Prosecutors have also alleged that Marset solicited advice about disposing of the bodies of his enemies over text messages.
Both Paraguay and Bolivia had also sought to detain Marset on criminal charges. In 2023, Bolivia, for instance, posted a $100,000 reward for information leading to his capture.
The US, meanwhile, offered a $2m bounty in May of last year for help arresting or convicting him.
Marset appeared to relish his reputation as one of South America’s “most wanted” criminal suspects. The Washington Post reported that he stamped his drug shipments with the label, “The King of the South”.
Media reports also indicated that Marset was a diehard football fan, investing in lower-level sports teams in Latin America and Europe. He had been on the run since July 2023, ahead of a planned operation at the time to detain him.
In 2021, he was briefly stopped in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, for travelling under a fake passport. But Uruguayan authorities ultimately issued him new travel documents that allowed him to leave the country, prompting outcry.
Since his arrest on Friday, Paraguay has said it too would seek Marset’s extradition so he could stand trial in the country.
Marset’s arrest follows another major operation last month in Mexico to capture the drug kingpin Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho”, a leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
That operation, however, resulted in El Mencho’s death and a wave of retaliatory attacks across Mexico.
