 In his early life, Leonidas Vargas was a poor and little-educated meat vendor in the rural region of Caqueta, a southern region of Colombia.He eventually became associated with drug lords José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar, the wealthy and powerful leader of the Medellín Cartel.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Vargas ran a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire that included a network of large cocaine-processing laboratories deep in the jungles of Caqueta.