A week before his trial was scheduled to start, a former director of Venezuelan military intelligence admitted guilt to drug trafficking and narcoterrorism charges in a federal court.
Hugo Carvajal, who served under President Hugo Chavez’s rule from 2004 to 2011, entered a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday on charges of narcoterrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and weapons possession.
Federal prosecutors claimed the former major-general was responsible for a drug cartel that attempted to “flood” the US with cocaine along with other senior Venezuelan government and military officials.
According to the prosecution, the cartel collaborated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a de facto destabilized armed group that the US once viewed as a “terrorist” organization.
Prosecutors wrote to the defense attorney this week that they thought federal sentencing guidelines mandated a mandatory minimum of 50 years in prison.
The interim US attorney in Manhattan, Jay Clayton, said in a statement, “the deeply troubling reality is that there are powerful foreign government officials who conspire to flood the United States with drugs that kill and debilitate.”
El Pollo,
Carvajal, who is referred to as one of the most powerful members of the socialist leader’s 1999-2013 rule, was a part of the failed 1992 coup that resulted in Chavez becoming known. He is known as “the chicken” or “El Pollo” in Spanish.
After breaking with him to support the US-backed political opposition, Carvajal then traveled as a diplomat for the current Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Following a more than 10-year search by the Justice Department to bring him to US soil in July 2023, Carvajal was extradited from Spain.
Source: Aljazeera
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