The son of a former Colombian paramilitary drug-cartel kingpin was sentenced Friday in San Diego federal court to four years and three months in prison for an international cocaine trafficking conspiracy.
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Sebastian Meneses Toro, 26, was extradited from Colombia to San Diego in June 2024, two years after federal prosecutors in San Diego secured a three-count indictment against him. Colombian national police reportedly arrested Meneses in August 2022, two months after he was indicted, at an international airport in the Colombian capitol of Bogotá.
Meneses pleaded guilty to one count of the indictment in March.
He is the son of Daniel “Don Mario” Rendon Herrera, who is serving a 35-year sentence in a federal prison in Texas. Federal prosecutors in New York said that before Rendon’s arrest in 2009, he was the leader of the Clan del Golfo, a violent transnational drug-trafficking organization that evolved from a paramilitary group. Rendon pleaded guilty to a charge related to leading that group and also admitted that he conspired to provide material support to its paramilitary wing, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Few specifics about Meneses’ case have emerged in court documents or were discussed Friday in court. He admitted in his plea agreement that beginning in at least 2019, he conspired to traffic cocaine totaling more than 450 kilograms — or nearly 1,000 pounds — from Colombia to Mexico and Costa Rica, with the purpose of bringing it into the U.S.
Specifically, Meneses admitted that he distributed more than 440 pounds of cocaine in March 2019 and nearly 380 pounds in November 2019.
At the time of his extradition, Latin American news outlets reported that Meneses was both the youngest drug trafficker ever extradited from Colombia to the U.S., and that his extradition marked the first time ever a father and son had been extradited from Colombia to the U.S. on similar charges.
It’s unclear exactly how Meneses followed his father into the world of drug trafficking, given that he was about 10 years old when his father was arrested. The criminal activity that Meneses pleaded guilty to started about a decade after his father’s arrest and about a year after his father was extradited to the U.S.
His attorney declined to comment after Friday’s hearing.
In court, defense attorney Matthew Lombard told the judge that Meneses’ mother is a psychologist in Colombia, that she tried to keep him away from his father’s bad influence and that his mother and father are “on opposite ends of the spectrum.” Lombard said Meneses has a loving and supportive family — four family members were in court Friday — and that he’s learned his lesson and won’t return to the drug world.
“I’m not even 1% of the person who entered prison a few years ago,” Meneses told the judge through a Spanish interpreter. He apologized to his family and to society for the harm he caused.
The Gulf Clan that Meneses’ father once led emerged from Colombia’s convoluted paramilitary movement that came to prominence in the 1980s, according to the think tank InSight Crime. Rendon was reportedly a finance chief for a wealthy paramilitary faction and one of the founding leaders of the Gulf Clan before taking full control in 2007 for about two years before his arrest, according to InSight Crime.
At the time of his 2022 sentencing in the New York case, prosecutors described Rendon as “once the most feared narco-terrorist in Colombia” and “one of the most prolific drug traffickers to ever operate in Colombia.”
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Bashant followed the government’s recommendation in sentencing Meneses to 51 months in prison.