by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
SDNY COURTHOUSE, Aug 13 – The narco trafficking brother of a Colombian senator in the party of President Gustavo Petro pled guilty on January 2, 2024 to a guideline sentence of 210 to 262 months.
Petro has spoken publicly of no long extraditing drug trafficking suspects to the US if they agree to stop trafficking.
Alvaro Fredy Cordoba Ruiz was extradited in January 2023 to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he was assigned a Criminal Justice Act lawyer and detained on consent. His extradition from Colombia had taken more than a year.
A superseding indictment was filed in February 2023 and on January 2, 2024 he pled guilty, stating that between July 2021 and February 2022, he agreed with others to send 500 grams or more of cocaine to the United States.
"I knew that the cocaine would end up in the United States and I knew what I was doing was wrong," he said in a scripted statement. He is the brother of Senator Piedad Cordoba of Petro's Pacto Historico party.
On March 22 co-defendant Alberto Alonso Jaramillo Ramirez was, the day after his extradition in from Colombia, presented before SDNY Magistrate Judge Gary Stein. Inner City Press was there, the only media in the SDNY Mag Court.
Jaramillo had been indicted on cocaine importation and machine gun charges. But it emerged that Colombia had only extradited him on the cocaine counts, and so the machine gun charges, like those on which former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted earlier in the month, would in this case be dropped.
The day's CJA lawyer, from a large law firm based in New Jersey, consented to detention.
On April 12 another large firm defense lawyer for Alvaro Fredy Cordobo Ruiz asked that he be sentenced to 60 months or five years. They note that another defendant "extradited on the same plane as Alvaro from Colombia" got 96 months.
On April 19, the US Attorney's Office wrote in requesting on Alvaro Fredy Cordobo Ruiz 210 months. On April 26, 2024, he got 168 months.
Docketed on June 2, 2025 Alvaro Fredy Cordoba Ruiz wrote in from prison in Texarkana asking for a reduction to five years, quoting Leo Tolstoy.
For a August 14 sentencing defense counsel from Duane Morris late-filed a heavily redacted memo asking for time served. Whole sections are blacked out, including a paragraph after a reference to Gandhi and the identity of more letter writers, contrary to the Second Circuit's decision in Lee v. Greenwood. We may have more on this.
The overall case is US v. Cordoba Ruiz, et al., 22-cr-121 (Liman)
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