Gen. Hugo Carvajal, the former head of Venezuela’s military intelligence service, will be extradited from Spain to the United States on drug-trafficking charges, the man’s lawyer announced, as quoted by Reuters.

The information, initially obtained by Reuters journalists from a court source close to the case, was later confirmed by Zach Margulis-Onuma, the lawyer for the former Venezuelan officer.

Carvajal could arrive in the U.S. Wednesday afternoon or more likely Thursday, he said, given the extradition order made by the High Court of Madrid.

The decision to extradite him was made a day ago, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last week rejected his latest legal bid to avoid extradition to the US, according to the sources cited.

Nicknamed “El Pollo” (The Chicken), Carvajal was former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s confidant in the armed forces for more than a decade.

The general also held Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, in high esteem, but fell out of favor in 2019 after expressing support for opposition candidate Juan Guaido during Venezuela’s 2019 constitutional crisis following a presidential election that Western powers say was marred by massive fraud .

The Venezuelan general managed to hide in Spain for two years

Shortly after these statements, Maduro fired the general from the armed forces, stripped him of his rank of major general following his statements, and charged him with treason.

Immediately afterwards, Carvajal fled to the Dominican Republic and from there to Spain, where he was arrested in April 2019 at the request of US authorities, who accused him of harboring drug traffickers in Colombia and supplying weapons to communist guerrillas. country.

But in September 2019, Spain’s High Court refused to extradite him, citing that the extradition request was “vague” and “ill-motivated”. However, only two months later, the court overturned the decision, but the general managed to disappear, then he hid in Spain for two years.

Spanish authorities managed to find him only two years later, and in September 2021, Carvajal was arrested again.

Carvajal has long been wanted by the US Treasury Department, which suspects him of supporting the Revolutionary Armed Front of Colombia (FARC) in the organization’s drug trade. The United States accuses him in a 2011 act of coordinating the transportation of more than 5.6 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S. market from Venezuela to Mexico.

Carvajal, who faces ten years to life in prison, denies any involvement in drug trafficking.

The United States in 2020 accused Carvajal of drug trafficking, along with more than a dozen other high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including President Nicolás Maduro. Carvajal denies supporting cocaine trafficking to the United States.