The Asylum and Refuge Office, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, has rejected the second asylum request to the former head of Venezuelan Intelligence Hugo ‘El Pollo’ Carvajal, as confirmed by Interior sources to Europa Press.
The Office sees no reason to grant protection in Spain to the former general and, according to Efe sources from the Interior, it has already communicated its resolution to his defense, which may appeal it through administrative channels before the National Court.
This is the second time that ‘El Pollo’ requested international protection. Following this request, the Criminal Chamber of the National High Court agreed last December to paralyze his extradition again “pending the corresponding administrative resolution.”
This would be the third time that his delivery to the United States has been halted, which demands his extradition for alleged crimes of drug and arms trafficking.
The department of Fernando Grande Marlaska rejected the first appeal it filed against this decision in October 2021, but the Court has yet to rule on the last resource which he presented.
In this way, since he was arrested in Madrid in September 2021 after almost two years hidden, Carvajal has not relented in his efforts to avoid his surrender to the US Justice, which accuses him of being part of an organization dedicated to drug trafficking and related to the FARC.
The National Court gave the green light to its extradition in November 2019, after revoking an initial decision of the third section of the Criminal Court not to hand him over. But, by then, Carvajal was already unaccounted for.
Two years later it was arrested in Madrid and began his judicial offensive, which apart from the battery of appeals filed against the decisions that were unfavorable to him and led to his surrender to the US, he also offered to testify before another judge of the National High Court.
First he said that it would be about terrorism issues, but finally he ended up pointing to alleged payments to former leaders of Podemos through the state oil company (PDVSA), which led to the reopening of a case on the financing of the party that had been filed in 2016 and that is currently stopped after the Court considered that the investigations ordered by the judge are prospective.
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In parallel, the delivery of Carvajal has been diluted after the court paralyzed it on several occasions, once in the absence of the United States giving guarantees on the conviction of life imprisonment that could be imposed there, and the last one waiting to know the fate of the second request for asylum, now denied.
The former head of Military Counterintelligence with Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro is persecuted in Washington for events that occurred between 1999 and 2019, when he would have belonged to the so-called ‘Cartel of the Suns’, a criminal organization allegedly managed by ‘Chavista’ charges that, with the alleged collaboration of the FARC and other armed groups, would have introduced large amounts of drugs in the United States.