The Diplomat
The Criminal Chamber of the National Court has rejected the conditional release of Hugo El Pollo Carvajal, former Venezuelan intelligence chief, on the grounds that he is a “flight risk”.
Carvajal is being pursued by US authorities for his alleged membership, between 1999 and 2019, in the so-called Cartel of the Suns, a criminal organization allegedly run by Chavista leaders and which has been accused of smuggling large quantities of drugs into the United States with the help of the FARC and other armed groups.
In an order dated December 28, to which the agency Europa Press has had access, the magistrates of the Third Section reject the provisional freedom, requested by Carvajal’s defense pending the resolution of his possible surrender to the United States, considering that, at this moment, “the risk of flight is even greater” than when the previous denials of freedom were issued, since now the request for asylum has already been denied by the Ministry of the Interior.
In this regard, the judges regret that, despite the fact that “an order has been issued, already final, considering the guarantees provided by the United States authorities to be sufficient, as established in the extradition order of the Plenary of the Court”, the delivery to the American authorities has not yet materialized “due to a clearly dilatory and abusive maneuver, to request asylum again”.
“The continuous obstacles to the extradition denote an attempt to avoid the international legal cooperation already resolved jurisdictionally and governmentally, which together with the undeniable fact that the defendant hid for a long time from this Court, determine a risk of flight that legitimizes, as a necessary and proportional precautionary measure, unconditional imprisonment,” adds the court.
Carvajal has been in the hands of the Spanish authorities since September 9, when he was arrested by the National Police in Madrid during a joint operation with the DEA. His capture reactivated his extradition to the United States, which was approved in 2020 but had not been able to materialize because Carvajal fled in November 2019, although his defense stresses that he never left Spain. The Criminal Chamber ordered his extradition to the United States on October 21, but just 24 hours later it was paralyzed pending receipt of the aforementioned guarantees.
In these months, El Pollo has also initiated a “process of collaboration” with the Spanish Justice that has resulted in two court appearances and the delivery of various documentation to the Central Court of Instruction Number 6, all of which has led to the reopening of a case on the alleged illegal financing of Podemos that was archived in 2016.
