Colombian police officer who led a DEA-approved squad pleads guilty | El Nuevo Herald Colombian police officer who worked with the DEA pleads guilty to betraying the DEA

A Colombian police captain who oversaw a unit that worked closely with US counternarcotics agents has pleaded guilty to charges that he attempted to betray the Drug Enforcement Administration ( DEA) before the same traffickers who were fighting together.

Juan Pablo Mosquera changed his statement in federal court in Miami on Wednesday, just as he was due to stand trial on two counts of obstruction of justice.

Mosquera's arrest in 2018 and his subsequent extradition to the United States was another source of embarrassment abroad for the DEA, which has dealt for years with corrupt police and deadly leaks by the foreign police units it trains and supports.

Mosquera was assigned to a unit vetted and supervised by the DEA's “Sensitive Investigation Unit” (SIU), the gold standard for its foreign partnerships.

Mosquera was accused of trying to sell information about what he believed was an impending drug trafficking indictment against an American who had abandoned parole decades earlier.

According to a three-page letter accompanying Mosquera's statement, a 37-year-old relative of the police officer put him in contact with Juan Carlos Dávila-Bonilla, a Colombian who had been convicted twice of distributing cocaine in Germany and Italy.

The two met near the Colombian city of Cali in 2018 and Mosquera showed Dávila-Bonilla text messages and shared information about a DEA investigation into an American, identified in court documents only by his initials P.L., who was wanted on an arrest warrant for fleeing custody in Arkansas in the 1990s.

When DEA agents learned that Mosquera and Dávila-Bonilla were trying to sell information about the investigation, they traveled to Cali to meet with Mosquera, falsely informing him that an indictment and extradition warrant would be filed against him. P.L. in Miami.

“Shortly after learning this information, Mosquera informed Dávila-Bonilla that P.L. it was 'hot,' ”the former police officer said in his statement.

Less than a week later, Dávila-Bonilla was recorded on a phone call with someone he believed to be an associate of P.L. in drug trafficking, but that it was actually a confidential DEA source telling him that Miami's extradition request was imminent and that the American had to leave Colombia.

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P.L. He was never named in a Miami drug indictment, according to Mosquera's statement, although his record for evading parole appears to match Patrick Liljebeck's criminal record. Another man, Kylan Patrick Liljebeck, was arrested months earlier for his alleged relationship with the seizure by Mosquera's unit of 49 kilograms of cocaine aboard a Colombian sailing ship. Shortly after Mosquera's arrest, Kylan Patrick Liljebeck himself was charged in Miami along with two other people. His current whereabouts are unknown.

As part of the plea agreement signed with Dávila-Bonilla, prosecutors appear to have confused the two Liljebecks, an apparent mistake that will likely come up when Mosquera is sentenced in January. Mosquera, in his statement, which was not signed by prosecutors, said he did not provide any information regarding the identities of the DEA's confidential sources.

Before his arrest, Mosquera had risen through the ranks of the Colombian national police, earning the praise of his superiors to become the head of a squad in Cali that worked closely with US law enforcement.

The DEA declined to comment on the case.

The DEA's Investigative Units program was created to help conduct investigations in foreign countries where the drug is obtained, but where US agents are invited and face more restrictions. They have carried out some of the biggest raids in the world and have arrested hundreds of kingpins. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the program has spread to more than 20 countries, including Thailand and Kenya.

However, a scathing report from the US Inspector General this summer criticized the DEA leadership in Washington for failing to adequately supervise its law enforcement partners abroad, even after a series of highly publicized scandals.

Among them is the case of a former DEA agent who worked with the units investigated in Colombia and who pleaded guilty last year to 19 counts of conspiring to launder millions of dollars from DEA-controlled accounts, spending the proceeds lavishly on luxury sports cars and Tiffany jewelry. The inspector general also discovered that two UEI members also accompanied DEA agents on “sex parties” organized by the cartel with prostitutes, a scandal that forced the resignation of DEA chief Michele Leonhart in 2015.

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