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Spanish Court Agrees to Extradite Former Venezuela Spy Chief to U.S.
Raphael Minder
5-7 minutes
Hugo Carvajal, once a prominent figure in the government of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, faces drug-trafficking charges in the United States.
Credit...Pool photo by Emilio Naranjo
Oct. 20, 2021
MADRID — Spain’s highest criminal court agreed on Wednesday to extradite Venezuela’s former intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, to the United States, where he faces drug trafficking charges, according to a court statement.
The National Court’s decision came after Mr. Carvajal was denied asylum in Spain. A court official said he cannot appeal the extradition order and could be sent to the United States at any time.
The ruling came just four days after the extradition to the United States of a key ally of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman known as Mr. Maduro’s financial fixer, had been arrested in Cape Verde, an island nation off the coast of West Africa, on American charges of money laundering.
Mr. Maduro retaliated for the Saab extradition, calling off talks with the opposition and jailing six executives of the Houston-based company Citgo Petroleum, who have been detained in Venezuela since 2017 and had been under house arrest. The events dealt a blow to the Biden administration’s hopes that it could ease tensions with Venezuela, and that negotiations between Mr. Maduro and his opponents would lead to free and fair elections.
Living conditions in Venezuela
have deteriorated sharply in recent years, worsened by corruption and a U.S. trade embargo, with poverty, disease and violence now rampant. Human rights investigators say the leftist government has grown
increasingly repressive.
Spain has become one of the main safe havens for members of the Venezuelan opposition and defecting members of the Socialist Party who have fled the political and economic turmoil.
Mr. Carvajal was arrested in Madrid in September for the second time in less than three years. The police said at the time that he had been living “fully shut-in” at an undisclosed location in Madrid, relying on the help of allies who were not identified.
Mr. Carvajal was a prominent figure in the government of Mr. Maduro before
breaking with him in dramatic fashion. He released
a video in February 2019 that accused Mr. Maduro of running a corrupt dictatorship whose top officials were engaged in drug trafficking.
Both he and Mr. Saab have knowledge and information that could prove damaging to Mr. Maduro and his allies.
Mr. Carvajal was first detained on the American extradition request in April 2019 after he fled to Spain. But he was then released from a Spanish prison after
a court deemed the extradition request to be too “abstract” to establish his involvement in drug trafficking.
Prosecutors successfully appealed the ruling, but Mr. Carvajal went missing, creating a diplomatic headache for Spain and adding another twist in a long cat-and-mouse game.
In a February 2019
interview with The New York Times, Mr. Carvajal denied that he was involved in drug trafficking. After his detention in Spain and during his extradition hearing, he and his lawyers claimed that the drug charges had been fabricated, and that the case brought by the United States was politically motivated.
The United States Justice Department has said that in April 2006, Mr. Carvajal coordinated the transportation of about six U.S. tons of cocaine to Mexico from Venezuela, according to
charges filed in federal court in New York. If convicted, he would face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life.
Known by the nickname “El Pollo,” or “The Chicken,” Mr. Carvajal served for several years as the military intelligence chief under Hugo Chávez, the former leader of Venezuela, and under Mr. Maduro. Later, he was a lawmaker in the governing Socialist Party before his abrupt falling-out with Mr. Maduro, Mr. Chávez’s successor.
Mr. Carvajal urged the military to side with Mr. Maduro’s
main opponent, Juan Guaidó. Mr. Guaidó was recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate president by the United States and several other Western governments, but that has not prevented Mr. Maduro from
holding onto power, even as his country’s economic problems have spiraled in recent years.
Though Mr. Carvajal cannot appeal the extradition ruling directly, he could try to remain in Spain by appealing the decision to deny him asylum, said Martín Palladino, a Spanish lawyer who specializes in extradition issues.
Since his arrest last month, Mr. Carvajal has also offered to cooperate with an investigation by Spain’s judiciary, claiming to have information that Venezuela helped fund Spain’s leftist Unidas Podemos party, a coalition partner in the government. Earlier this week, a Spanish judge set a hearing for Mr. Carvajal on Oct. 27 to testify on the matter.
Unidas Podemos has denied wrongdoing and the party’s spokesman, Pablo Echenique, accused Mr. Carvajal of offering to contribute “rubbish from the gutter.”
Raphael Minder covers Spain and Portugal, based in Madrid. He previously worked for Bloomberg News in Switzerland and for the Financial Times in Paris, Brussels, Sydney and finally Hong Kong.
@RaphaelMinder
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2021, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Spain Agrees to Extradite Ex-Venezuela Spy Chief.
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