The former head of Military Counterintelligence in the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro was arrested on September 9 after spending almost two years in hiding.
Everything was ready for the delivery of former Venezuelan general Hugo Armando Carvajal, known as Pollo Carvajal, to the US in October 2021, but the Spanish National Court stopped it at the last moment due to the lack of a procedure. Three months later and, despite having solved it, he is still in Spain, pending a second asylum request.
Since he was arrested on September 9 after almost two years in hiding, the former head of Military Counterintelligence in the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro has not relented in his efforts to prevent his surrender to the US Justice, which accuses him of being part of an organization dedicated to drug trafficking and related to the FARC guerrillas.
In addition to the battery of resources filed before the Justice, his offensive also goes through the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, before whom he requested asylum on two occasions. The first was denied and the second, which is being processed, is the one that now stops its delivery.
The National Court gave the green light to his extradition in 2019, after revoking an initial decision not to hand him over, but then Carvajal was already unaccounted for.
In reality, he was in Madrid, where he was arrested almost two years later, in September 2021, after having undergone several aesthetic operations and changing his address frequently to mislead the Police.
Since then, his defense has been trying to get him released, while trying by all means to prevent his extradition, appealing court decisions, requesting asylum or asking to testify in a case about financing the Spanish leftist party Podemos, targeting alleged payments to former leaders of the same through the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA.
The first request for asylum was denied by the Ministry of the Interior in Spain and the court in charge of his extradition, after considering Carvajal’s sudden collaboration in the case on the financing of Podemos a “delaying strategy”, made his extradition effective on October 20 .
The judicial journey seemed over and, in fact, the delivery was expected to be on October 23, but a day before and in a new script twist, the National High Court suspended it again: the United States needed to give guarantees about the conviction of life sentence that could be imposed there.
He did so a month later and the National Court declared his response sufficient on two occasions, the last in December, after rejecting one of Carvajal’s multiple appeals, who, despite that decision, managed to delay his delivery again.
This time, the court will wait for the Ministry of the Interior to resolve his second request for asylum, formulated around the political persecution of the United States that the former general alleges, and which is currently in process.
According to legal sources consulted by Efe, the court will not rule until that request is firm, that is, after the appeals that Carvajal will surely file are resolved, who, in addition, can present more requests for international protection as long as the reasons are not the same, indicate sources from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. (I)
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