Former Venezuelan general Hugo Armando Carvajal, known as “El Pollo Carvajal” and former head of Venezuela’s military intelligence, was extradited this Wednesday from Spain to the United States, a country that claimed him for drug trafficking crimes, after a long judicial journey that ended in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which dismissed his last demand last week.
“Yes,” replied his lawyer, María Dolores de Argüelles, when asked if Carvajal, 63, left for the United States. The soldier, very close at the time to Hugo Chávez, will appear on Thursday before a judge in a federal court in New York. Carvajal tried by all means to avoid extradition since the Spanish Police found him in 2021, after spending almost two years in an unknown whereabouts.
The delivery of Carvajal to the US Justice became effective after the Spanish National Court ordered Interpol to proceed “immediately” with his extradition, once the ECtHR dismissed his claim. Carvajal fled Venezuela with a false passport in February 2019 and in April he was arrested upon landing in Madrid and entered preventive detention.
“that I delivered”
Despite the reluctance of Carvajal, who assured that in the United States he will be sentenced to life imprisonment, the ECHR affirmed his conviction that he will be “tried in a judicial system that respects the rule of law and the principles of a fair trial” and that he will have “full opportunity to organize his defense with the assistance of a lawyer.”
During the period in which he was a fugitive, the retired general underwent cosmetic surgery, wore false mustaches and wigs, and changed his address every three months. After being a weighty figure in Chavismo, Carvajal was repudiated by the government of Nicolás Maduro after having publicly supported the opposition Juan Guaidó, when he proclaimed himself president of Venezuela in February 2019.
The head of Parliament, the powerful Chavista leader Jorge Rodríguez, asked the United States to hand him over. “Hopefully the United States, Spain did not do it and it should have done it in accordance with the extradition treaties that Venezuela has with different countries of the world, hand over a criminal to Venezuela as is the case of Hugo Carvajal”, correspondent in a press conference.
A New York court accused him in 2011 of having coordinated the shipment of 5.6 tons of cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico in 2006, which later reached the United States, acts for which he could be sentenced to up to life imprisonment. He is also accused of having belonged to a cartel along with other high-ranking Venezuelan officials who trafficked drugs with the former Colombian FARC guerrilla.