The sentence against Andrés Fernando Tufiño was issued in December 2021 by a court in the Southern District of California. The federal prison sentence was set to last until December 2026. How is it that he was already free?
Author: La Tabla/Data Journalism Platform 21 OCT 2025
The case of Ecuadorian Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila, one of the two survivors of the U.S. forces attack on a makeshift submarine in the Caribbean, has taken a new turn, raising questions about the implementation of international justice.
Official documents from the Southern District Court of California confirm that Tufiño was sentenced on December 6, 2021, to 60 months in federal prison and five years of supervised release for conspiracy to transport cocaine on a vessel under U.S. jurisdiction.
The sentence stipulated that his release should occur no later than late 2026. However, just four years later, Tufiño resurfaced after surviving the military operation in which two of his companions died, and where Colombian Jeison Obando Pérez also survived. Both were promptly repatriated, with no public information available regarding Tufiño’s pending judicial situation in U.S. territory.