Former Venezuelan general Hugo Armando Carvajal, known as Pollo Carvajal, has already been extradited to the United States, a country that accuses him of crimes linked to drug trafficking, after a long judicial journey that ended at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which last week rejected his last lawsuit.
Legal sources have informed EFE Agency that the former head of Venezuelan counterintelligence during Hugo Chávez’s regime is already on his way to the United States, a country to which he has avoided being extradited by all means since the Spanish police found his whereabouts in 2021, after spending almost two years missing.
Carvajal’s surrender became definitively effective after yesterday the Spanish National Audience ordered Interpol to proceed “immediately” with his extradition, as the ECtHR rejected his demand.
Hugo Armando Carvajal fled Venezuela with a false passport in February 2019 and in April he was arrested upon landing in Madrid and entered into preventive detention.
A few months later, in September, the third criminal section of the Spanish Audiencia Nacional rejected his extradition against the discretion of the Public Ministry, and in the middle of the month he was released from prison.
The Anti-Drug Prosecutor appealed and in November the Full Hearing revoked the decision and authorized the delivery. The arrest was thwarted as it was not possible to discover his whereabouts until almost two years later. On September 9, 2021, he was located in an apartment in Madrid.
Pollo Carvajal had been in preventive detention since then due to the clear risk of flight that the judges considered and, during these years, his defense tried to prevent his extradition by all means and with all resources.
He unsuccessfully applied for asylum in Spain – something that still needs to be appealed – and challenged all the decisions that the judges handed down against him until he reached the ECtHR, which asked to stop his extradition, considering that in the US he risks being sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of obtaining parole.
The ECtHR rejected it because it was “convinced” that he would be tried in “a judicial system that respects the pre-eminence of the law and the principles of a fair trial in which he will have full possibility to organize his defense with a lawyer”.
Justice accuses him of crimes equivalent in Spain to belonging to a criminal organization or participation or collaboration with a terrorist organization and drug trafficking, considering that he would have been part of an organization dedicated to drug trafficking and related to the FARC, both in Venezuela and in Colombia and also with destination to the United States.
#Spain #hands #Hugo #Carvajal #lengthy #court #case