Then captain Hugo Chávez, at 1.73 meters tall, was far from being a big man. But when he met his namesake Hugo Carvajal, who was his subordinate at the military academy, he had no pity: he baptized him with a nickname that would become stronger than his own name. Pollo, or chicken. In addition to being rickety, in the eyes of the one who would become president of Venezuela, Carvajal had features that reminded him of a chicken. And Chavez was right.
El Pollo surpassed the bullying and he became an ally, friend and devotee of Chávez. It was part of the failed coup plan led by Chávez in 1992 and since then of all the operations that brought Chávez to power in 1999 and criminalized the Venezuelan state, even those after Chávez’s death.
Despite the face and build that earned him the nickname chicken, his work style made him closer to rats.
Those who shared the aisle of the Chavez theater with Carvajal describe him as a central character for the regime. In his testimonies to the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Chavez’s former bodyguard, Leamsy Salazar, said that in March 2013 he witnessed tons of cocaine being loaded onto military speedboats, under the general’s coordination.
The name of Carvajal, who was head of military intelligence, also appears directly involved in operations to send arms to FARC guerrillas in Colombia and in money laundering operations involving Lebanese terrorists from Hezbollah, which are under the auspices of Iran , turned Venezuela into a kind of offshore base for their operations in Latin America.
In 2014, he was arrested as soon as he landed in Aruba in an operation at the request of US courts. It was the first time that a top leader of the Chavez regime had fallen into the hands of American authorities in international action.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro, who took power after Chávez’s death in 2013, even considered a military operation against the former Dutch colony. At that time, El Pollo’s prison was seen as the pavement for everyone else in the regime.
Maduro evoked the “diplomatic immunity” of Carvajal, who months earlier had been sent to Aruba as the front post of consul of Venezuela. The problem was that local authorities never formally accepted the appointment. In other words: although he had a diplomatic passport, he was not a consul for anything and the discussion about whether immunities came with the fulfillment of functions began to be held in the days following his arrest.
Just four days later, Pollo Carvajal arrived in Caracas in glory. Freed from the “kidnapping” of the Americans and with the experience that all their peers should put their beards to soak. The American authorities were on their trail.
Last month, Pollo Carvajal was arrested again. This time in Spain, where he has had the status of a fugitive from justice since 2019, when he was granted parole after being caught trying to enter the country with a false passport.
Excerpts from Pollo Carvajal’s testimonies, leaked by the Spanish press, suggest that his chicken characteristics may be speaking louder than his rat’s soul. But worth a warning. Hugo Carvajal is much more than that. And he has been showing signs that, more than a chicken, deep down he can be the fox.
Pollo Carvajal’s statements – which speak of suitcases and suitcases of money disembarking in Argentina, Venezuela’s financial support for the foundation of Spanish Podemos and even a non-detailed contribution to the PT in Brazil – cannot be treated apart from a letter that he released in late September.
In it he is absolutely transparent. He absolutely does not want to be extradited to the United States. He has cleverly given Spanish judges and their advisers the job of smuggling information to the outside world that makes him indispensable in Spain. A strategy that doesn’t seem to have worked, as his extradition has already been approved.
But El Pollo does not stop behaving like a fox. He gives his messages and hints of a plan B, in case the extradition is confirmed. He won’t sing. Want to become a piece of advertising. A political prisoner on American soil. It will become a piece of propaganda that will have the support of half a dozen yuppie activists based in New York and Washington, DC, and a squad of highly paid people to move the lobby and the bullshit. lawfare, the very same cleverness that, in Brazil, served as ballast for the defense strategy of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
El Pollo is not Lula. And the United States is still not like Brazil. The results of the strategy of attacking the American judicial system from within have a route and results that are difficult to anticipate. But they are not impossible.
In his letter, he swears that he never dedicated his allegiance to the regime, but to the country. He speaks with precision that his knowledge and newspaper articles are of no use in liberating the Venezuela he proposes to defend. And the gap, in this case, is against the United States, which he calls the enemy.
The euphoria surrounding El Pollo’s cackling is justified. In your world, lying and manipulation only work if they have a good foundation of truth. Finally, it is never too much to doubt, especially for a creature that looks like a chicken, has a rat’s soul and the cunning of a fox.
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