Former Venezuela spymaster pleads guilty to narcoterrorism charge ahead of trial

MIAMI (AP) — A former Venezuelan spymaster who was close to the country’s late President Hugo Chávez pleaded guilty Wednesday to drug trafficking charges a week before his trial was set to begin in a Manhattan federal court.

Retired Maj. Gen. Hugo Carvajal was extradited from Spain in 2023 after more than a decade on the run from U.S. law enforcement, including included a botched arrest in Aruba while he was serving as a diplomat representing current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Carvajal pleaded guilty in court to all four criminal counts, including narco-terrorism, in an indictment accusing him of leading a cartel made up of senior Venezuelan military officers that attempted to “flood” the U.S. with cocaine in cahoots with leftist guerrillas from neighboring Colombia.

In a letter this week to defense counsel, prosecutors said they believe federal sentencing guidelines call for Carvajal to serve a mandatory minimum of 50 years in prison to a maximum of life.

Nicknamed “El Pollo,” Spanish for “the chicken,” Carvajal advised Chávez for more than a decade. He later broke with Marudo, Chávez’s handpicked successor, and threw his support behind the U.S.-backed political opposition — in dramatic fashion.

In a recording made from an undisclosed location, Carvajal called on his former military cohorts to rebel against a month into mass protests seeking to replace Maduro with lawmaker Juan Guaidó, whom the first Trump administration recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader as head of the democratically elected National Assembly.

The hoped-for barracks revolt never materialized, and Carvajal fled to Spain. In 2021 he was captured hiding out in a Madrid apartment after he defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared.

Carvajal’s straight-up guilty plea, without any promise of leniency, could be part of a gamble to win credit down the line for cooperating with U.S. efforts against a top foreign adversary that sits atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves.

Although Carvajal has been out of power for years, his backers say he can provide potentially valuable insights on the inner workings of the spread of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua into the U.S. and spying activities of the Maduro-allied governments of Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.

He may also be angling for Trump’s attention with information about voting technology company Smartmatic. One of Carvajal’s deputies was a major player in Venezuela’s electoral authority when the company was getting off the ground.

Florida-based Smartmatic says its global business was decimated when Fox News aired false claims by Trump allies that it helped rig the 2020 U.S. election. One of the company’s Venezuelan founders was later charged in the U.S. in a bribery case involving its work in the Philippines.

Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer in Latin America who oversaw commandos that hunted al-Qaida, sent a public letter this week to Trump urging the Justice Department to delay the start of Carvajal’s trial so officials can debrief the former spymaster.

“He’s no angel, he’s a very bad man,” Berntsen said in an interview. “But we need to defend democracy.”

Carvajal’s attorney, Robert Feitel, said prosecutors announced in court this month that they never extended a plea offer to his client or sought to meet with him.

“I think that was an enormous mistake,” Feitel told The Associated Press while declining further comment. “He has information that is extraordinarily important to our national security and law enforcement.”

In 2011, prosecutors alleged that Carvajal used his office to coordinate the smuggling of approximately 5,600 kilograms (12,300 pounds) of cocaine aboard a jet from Venezuela to Mexico in 2006. In exchange he accepted millions of dollars from drug traffickers, prosecutors said.

He allegedly arranged the shipment as one of the leaders of the so-called Cartel of the Suns — a nod to the sun insignias affixed to the uniforms of senior Venezuelan military officers. The cocaine was sourced by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization and which for years took refuge in Venezuela as it sought to overthrow Colombia’s government.

Carvajal “exploited his position as the director of Venezuela’s military intelligence and abandoned his responsibility to the people of Venezuela in order to intentionally cause harm to the United States,” DEA Acting Administrator Robert Murphy said. “After years of trying to evade law enforcement, (he) will now likely spend the rest of his life in federal prison.”

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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed.