Hugo Armando Carvajal, popularly known as The chicken Carvajal (61 years old), had been fleeing for almost two years since he ran away from his home in Madrid, after learning that the court of the National High Court had changed its mind and authorized his extradition to the United States as the US authorities had been claiming. They accused him of being, as head of the Venezuelan secret services for years, the hinge between the Colombian guerrillas of the FARC and Venezuela in a plan designed by former President Hugo Chávez to “fight the United States by flooding it with cocaine.”
Agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have tried to follow in his elusive footsteps ever since. Until they gathered enough evidence that they placed him in an apartment in Madrid, a third floor on Torrelaguna street, curiously close to the Canillas police complex. There, two days ago, the US agents and those from the Spanish Organized Crime and Drugs Unit (Udyco) finally mounted an operation and arrested him this Thursday night: “I have been locked up in flats for two years, I moved every three months, except in this time he had eight, ”he confessed to the police as they handcuffed the most wanted secret agent in America.
The ten million dollars offered by the DEA to anyone who could reveal his whereabouts led to the arrival of multiple pieces of information, which were verified “one by one” by the police from the Fugitives unit. “We looked at if he had left the country, if he was in Andorra, he was previously located in different parts of Spain, but finally the most concrete information was the latter: he was in Madrid and had a person who was assisting him,” say police sources. That person turned out to be a Venezuelan woman. “In theory the apartment was in the name of that woman. She was the one who provided him with everything he needed. No neighbor had ever seen him ”.
El Pollo “didn’t go out at all, he only looked out onto the terrace at night.” However, the agents were able to verify that when the woman left the apartment, there was still movement inside. “Noises were heard and lights were turned on when she was not there.” The policemen even waited for the woman to leave and offered her a millionaire sum for her confession: “She didn’t want to, she left.” But shortly after, they verified that she alerted Carvajal’s family and friends that they had located him.
Feeling trapped, El Pollo ―who said goodbye to his wife, Angelica, two years ago saying “I’ll be fine, take care of the children” (he has eight fruit from two marriages) -, leaned out of the window of the house and was seen by the agents, who were scrutinizing the area. Shortly after, they were placing handcuffs on him. They found him locked in the last room on the floor with a knife in his hand.
Thus ended another of their long escapes. Before, he gave the US authorities a slip with the help of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Later he fled from his successor, Nicolás Maduro, who considered him a traitor and settled in Madrid.
Although the DEA information alluded to the fact that Carvajal could have undergone cosmetic surgery to change his appearance, the agents who arrested him, for the second time, do not confirm: “It’s the same.” Carvajal had been released the first time, when initially the National High Court considered that the reason for his extradition responded to “political reasons.” Then he emerged triumphant from the Estremera prison (Madrid), at whose doors his family awaited him. On this occasion, after a thorny and controversial judicial journey in which pressure was even reported on the judges of the National Court, he has fallen again and is waiting to be extradited to the United States.