Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos

Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos is an important node in the the archive Latin America network because the public record places this person inside a documented cross-border criminal system rather than an isolated local case. The principal role established by the sources used for this profile is Los Valles member who supplied intelligence about law-enforcement activity. That role links the person to Los Valles cocaine network based in Honduras with routes into Guatemala and onward north. The profile is therefore designed as a gateway into the wider organization, trafficking routes, co-defendants, suppliers, facilitators and enforcement cases that surround the individual.

The core evidentiary base for the profile comes from U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia, La Prensa. DOJ said Pineda Santos maintained a network for obtaining information about raids, surveillance and possible cooperators. This matters because the archive separates adjudicated facts from allegations: guilty pleas, jury verdicts and sentences are stated as established legal outcomes, while conduct described only in indictments or prosecutorial summaries is explicitly attributed to the government. That distinction is particularly important in the Latin America graph, where the same person may appear in several cases spread across different jurisdictions and years.

He was extradited from Guatemala to the United States in May 2022. The geographic dimension is not treated as decorative background. In the current graph, every supported route becomes a potential cross-link. For Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos, the key route is Los Valles cocaine network based in Honduras with routes into Guatemala and onward north. This allows readers to move outward from the person into the larger cocaine corridor connecting South America, the Caribbean-facing coast of Central America, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, without implying that every group using the same corridor worked together.

He pleaded guilty in September 2022. That point also helps define the person’s place inside LOS VALLES. the archive does not flatten leaders, suppliers, pilots, police facilitators, political intermediaries and logistics coordinators into one generic “member” relationship. Where the source describes a specific function, the graph keeps that function. Doing so makes the organization page more useful because it can show how the network actually operated: who received cocaine, who moved it, who protected it, who financed it and who connected it to the next country.

La Prensa reported the federal court imposed a 70-month sentence in January 2023. The legal history is stored separately from the narrative so later changes can be added without rewriting the person’s identity. A fugitive notice is date-stamped; an indictment remains an allegation; a guilty plea or verdict is recorded as a conviction event; and a sentence is shown exactly when a reliable source provides it. This is especially important for older Honduran and Guatemalan cases because extraditions and U.S. proceedings often occurred years after the conduct described in the original investigation.

The structured legal-status field for Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos records the documented punishment as 70 months (5 years 10 months) in U.S. federal prison. That number is not rounded or replaced by a generic label. Keeping the exact disposition lets the archive compare outcomes across members of the same organization and prevents a common error in organized-crime databases: treating every defendant in a multi-person case as though the court imposed the same sentence or found the same conduct.

The most valuable part of the profile is cross-linking. Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos connects upward to the relevant organization, sideways to people from the same trafficking or protection network, and outward to geographic and cartel nodes when those relationships are documented. These links are bidirectional wherever the package contains the corresponding entity. This means a reader entering through Los Montes, Los Cachiros, Los Valles, the Lorenzana DTO, Sinaloa or a South American supply route can eventually reach the same person from a different path.

As the Latin America package expands, the canonical record for Rafael Antonio Pineda Santos should remain stable while new source-backed relationships accumulate around it. Future additions may include specific properties, airstrips, front companies, murders, seizures, extradition events, relatives, corrupt facilitators or South American suppliers. None should be inferred merely from geography. The current profile establishes only the relationships supported by the cited material and leaves room for the graph to grow without sacrificing evidentiary discipline.