The State Department will announce the designation of the Clan del Golfo, a cocaine- and human-trafficking organized criminal militia in Colombia, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) on Tuesday, Breitbart News learned.
The State Department will also brand the Clan del Golfo a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), a separate category that imposes distinct sanctions on members and leadership of the terrorist group. Breitbart News first reported the designation exclusively on Tuesday alongside the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo.
“Clan del Golfo is not just a drug cartel, it’s a Foreign Terrorist Organization that has inflicted untold suffering on the Colombian people and threatens our region’s stability,” a senior State Department official affirmed in remarks to Breitbart News. “This group is a direct threat to our national security interests, and we will use every tool at our disposal — sanctions, law enforcement, intelligence, and international cooperation — to dismantle its operations, cut off its funding, and hold its members accountable.”
In a statement anticipated to be released on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed this sentiment, referring to the Clan del Golfo as a “violent and powerful criminal organization with thousands of members.”
“The group’s primary source of income is cocaine trafficking, which it uses to fund its violent activities,” Sec. Rubio notes in the statement. “Clan del Golfo is responsible for terrorist attacks against public officials, law enforcement and military personnel, and civilians in Colombia.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on the first day of his second term in office, January 20, facilitating a process for the State Department to more easily place drug cartels and other organized criminal syndicates on the FTO and SDGT lists. In the order, President Trump affirmed that “international cartels constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime” that requires expanded resources for American officials to address.
“The Cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States,” the executive order asserted, referring to cartels as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” While primarily referring in the text to Mexican drug cartels, the intent is to expand the State Department’s ability to address organized drug-trafficking organizations as national security challenges, not merely a law enforcement problem.
An organization that appears on the FTO list faces onerous sanctions intended to deprive it of resources to engage in terrorist activity. Members of the Clan del Golfo are now banned from entering the United States, and any already present in the country are eligible for removal. Any of the organization’s assets identified as being in America are subject to freezing. “Material support” for the group is now illegal. Appearing on the SDGT list also bans Americans from “any transaction or dealing by a U.S. person in any property or interests in property of persons designated as SDGTs.”
“Non-U.S. persons who engage in prohibited transactions or dealings subject to U.S. jurisdiction with SDGTs or with persons otherwise blocked pursuant to E.O. 13224 may be subject to civil or criminal penalties, and may also risk being sanctioned by OFAC,” according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). “Foreign financial institutions may also be subject to correspondent and payable through account sanctions if they knowingly facilitate significant transactions for or on behalf of an SDGT.”
The Clan del Golfo emerged from one of the many armed groups involved in Colombia’s decades of messy guerrilla warfare in the 20th Century. It evolved out of its paramilitary state through multiple rounds of expansion under the control of the Úsuga brothers, known as “Giovanni” and “Otoniel.” Otoniel was captured in 2022 and extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2023.
“The human misery caused by the defendant’s incredibly violent, vengeful, and bloody reign as leader of the Clan de Golfo drug trafficking organization may never be fully calculated due to its magnitude,” United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said following his conviction, “but today’s lengthy sentence delivers appropriate justice and sends a message to other paramilitary and cartel leaders that the United States will seek their arrest and extradition in order to hold them accountable in our courts of law.”
The Clan del Golfo has nonetheless continued to expand cocaine-trafficking activities, particularly in northern Colombia. It was particularly successful during its expansions in absorbing smaller criminal gangs in remote areas to raise its membership numbers into the thousands.
While its primary source of income is believed to be cocaine trafficking, the Clan del Golfo has also been found involved in illicit mining and human trafficking through the Panamanian border and up the Darién Gap jungle trail.
The current head of the organization has been identified as Jobanis de Jesús Ávila Villadiego or “Chiquito Malo.” Reports estimate the terrorist organization has as many as 10,000 members.
The U.S. terror designations follow growing international concern regarding the cocaine trade in Latin America and the publication of the United Nations’ annual drug and crime report this year, finding record-high cocaine production globally, almost entirely fueled by activities in Colombia.
Drug-trafficking activity in Colombia has skyrocketed under President Gustavo Petro, a radical leftist and proud former member of the M19 Marxist terrorist guerrilla. Petro has repeatedly defended cocaine as “not worse than whiskey” and less dangerous than the use of fossil fuels or the consumption of sugar.
The Clan del Golfo is currently formally part of a process that Petro’s administration has branded “Total Peace,” a proposed negotiation to disarm that has not borne fruit at press time. The government and leaders of the clan are reportedly negotiating with the mediation of Qatar. According to El Tiempo, the Petro government and the Clan del Golfo announced on December 5 that the government would create three “temporary location zones” to home, disarm, and reintegrate members into society, despite the unclear legality of such a process.