36 years after US jailbreak, fugitive arrested in Peru

INQUIRER.net PHOTO

LIMA, Peru — A man who escaped from a jail in Florida 36 years ago has been re-arrested in Peru, after spending more than half his life on the lam, authorities said Wednesday.

Police finally caught up with convicted drug trafficker Ricardo Garcia-Godos McBride, a 62-year-old Peruvian national, as he was walking down the street in Peru’s capital Lima, in an upscale neighborhood called San Isidro.

Garcia-Godos was convicted on drug charges in the United States in 1979 and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

But he escaped the following year and went on to evade the authorities for more than three and a half decades.

Peruvian police did not say when he had returned to Peru.

“He had an international arrest order for the crime of drug trafficking,” police criminal investigations chief Miguel Nunez Polar told journalists.

Peru has for decades been one of the world’s top producers of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. CBB