Juan Gonzalo Angel is an alleged money launderer and a former director of Pablo Escobar’s foundation “Medellin Sin Tugurios,” which constructed a neighborhood with the drug lord’s name.
Angel and his brother Luis Guillermo got into the Medellin Cartel through the Ochoa Clan, a crime family that helped co-founded the drug trafficking organization with Escobar.
The self-proclaimed businessman’s brother, Luis Guillermo Angel, was a cartel pilot until he surrendered to the authorities in 1992.
The Prosecutor General’s Office accused both of money laundering in 2020.
The cartel days
According to the former director of civil aviation authority Aerocvil, who is in jail on drug trafficking charges, Angel flew former President Alvaro Uribe to his family estate on June 14, 1983 to pick up his injured brother and the remains of his father, after he had been killed in a shoot-out.
Aerocivil press release
Sanclemente made the claim to contradict media that in 1983 reported that Escobar lent Uribe one of his helicopters to travel to the Guacharacas estate.
1983 article from Medellin newspaper El Mundo
Post-cartel fraud
Between 1993 and 1998, Angel allegedly led the “corporate expansions into new Latin American markets” of the Colombian subsidiary of a Mexican company called “Makro Corporations.”
This expansion included the fraudulent purchase of 72.28% of the shares of the subsidiary, Makro Computo SA, by two of Angel’s companies, Colbufalos SA and Zurbaran SA, from its Mexican owners, according to a 2005 court ruling.
Extract of a 2015 court ruling on Angel’s involvement in fraud.
Media an money laundering
According to his LinkedIn page, Angel in 2007 founded a media company called “Globalmedia Telecomunicaciones” in Medellin in 2007, which since acquired “four channels include the agricultural sector–focused TVAgro and the news-centered Cablenoticias.”
As head of GlobalMedia Telecomunicaciones, Juan Gonzalo Angel Restrepo leads a firm that has achieved a 90 percent share of the Colombian cable market and has concluded numerous transactions that provide content to other Latin American markets.
Two years before founding his company, Angel took part in the election of the government’s television regulator, Fernando Alvarez, according to journalist Daniel Coronell.
The former cartel associate was linked to the drug trade again in November 2020 when the prosecution opened a money laundering investigation into Angel and his brother.
Extract of money laundering investigation
The former cartel associate threatened to sue Colombia Reports in November 2022 as part of a reported attempt by 58 alleged drug traffickers and money launderers that sought to erase their ties to the mafia from the internet.
