The National Police arrested Hugo Carvajal this Friday in Madrid, a Chavista general who at the end of February broke with the Nicolás Maduro regime and called for rebellion. He was a front-line figure in the Armed Forces, head of the military counterintelligence for eight years, and a deputy of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Carvajal is claimed by the United States with the accusation of maintaining ties with drug trafficking networks.
The arrest took place at 3:30 p.m. at his son’s home in the Spanish capital as an extradition request from Washington was in force, according to sources from the Security Forces. Carvajal had been in the spotlight of the United States for drug trafficking for years, and in 2017, when he was a deputy in the National Assembly, he asked the Treasury Department to remove his name from the black list of Chavista leaders sanctioned for relations with drug trafficking. . The route of individual sanctions to the top of the regime has been in recent years the main pressure mechanism exerted by the Donald Trump Administration. This Saturday, Carvajal will be at the disposal of the National Court, in charge of studying extradition requests. The case has fallen to Judge Alejandro Abascal, reinforcement magistrate of the Central Court of Instruction 6, reports Fernando J. Pérez.
The political turn of the military, who had already progressively distanced himself from the ruling party, set a significant precedent as he was a high-ranking official. It happened on the eve of February 23, when the opposition to Maduro tried to introduce shipments of medical supplies and nutritional supplements across the borders of Colombia and Brazil. The attempt failed, however, coinciding with that operation there were hundreds of desertions. That of Carvajal, who recognized Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, was the one that generated the most expectations due to a possible domino effect on the troops, which ultimately did not occur. The now detained man openly called for rebellion. “It is up to you, brothers in arms, how this all ends,” he said in a video posted on social media.
“As the person responsible for monitoring the military establishment of Venezuela for more than 10 years, I feel the duty to be clear with my armed force, the one that I tried so hard to protect from all kinds of threats, deviations, and interference. As of today, we technically have no capacity to face any enemy. Whoever says otherwise is lying, ”continued the former general in reference to Maduro’s warmongering rhetoric, who since Guaidó launched his challenge has hidden himself in the military forces and the militia, and the precarious conditions of the armed forces.
That day he put himself under Guaidó’s orders. “Here is one more soldier for the causes of freedom and democracy, to be useful in the achievement of restoring the constitutional order that allows us to call free elections and thus listen to the true will of our sovereign people,” he said. However, his decision had no further travel.
The FARC and Hezbollah
In addition to its inclusion in the call Clinton list, Carvajal, nicknamed The chicken, it was accused in the past of also having links with the Colombian guerrilla of the FARC and with Hezbollah. The accusations against Hugo Carvajal by the United States were based on the discovery of various documents in the computer of Raúl Reyes, former FARC commander, which pointed to his alleged collaboration in the delivery of weapons to the guerrilla group and in a business network related to drug trafficking.
“All the information that came out there to the Supreme Court of Colombia and Spain was dismissed due to mismanagement that happened there … Everything that appears there is attributed to me,” defended the general then, who left the General Directorate of Counterintelligence Military in 2014. It is not the first time that Carvajal faces an arrest. It had already happened in 2014 on the Caribbean island of Aruba, where he had been appointed consul general by the Maduro regime and was awaiting official accreditation from the local government. He was deprived of liberty for three days and then had to leave the island.