Aruba to hold Venezuela official seeks immunity

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ORANJESTAD, Aruba (AP) — A judge in Aruba ruled Friday
that the highest-ranking Venezuelan official ever arrested on a U.S.
warrant will remain behind bars pending an extradition request on drug
charges.
Hugo Carvajal, a former head of Venezuelan military
intelligence and close confidant of the late president Hugo Chavez, was
arrested upon arriving at Aruba’s airport, officials said Thursday. U.S.
authorities allege he’s one of several high-ranking Venezuelan military
and law enforcement officials who provided a haven to major drug
traffickers from neighboring Colombia and helped them export large
amounts of U.S. bound cocaine through Venezuela.
His surprise
arrest has cast a spotlight on what’s known in Venezuela as the "Cartel
of the Suns," referring to rogue, high-ranking military officers
believed to have grown rich from drug-running. Top Venezuelan officers
wear sun insignia on their uniforms.
Together with the unsealing
Thursday of a drug indictment against two other Venezuelan officials,
Carvajal’s arrest is likely to ratchet up tensions between the U.S. and
Venezuela’s socialist government, which frequently accuses Washington of
conspiring against it and using the drug war to apply pressure on Latin
America.
President Nicolas Maduro has already threatened to
retaliate against Aruba, just 15 miles off Venezuela’s coast, unless
Carvajal is freed. The president likened Carvajal’s arrest to an
"ambush" and "kidnapping" that violates international law and tramples
on Venezuela’s sovereignty because he had been appointed the country’s
consul to the Caribbean island. Prosecutors in Aruba say that while
Carvajal was carrying a diplomatic passport he isn’t entitled to
immunity because he was not yet accredited by the Netherlands, which
runs foreign affairs for its former colony.
"We won’t let our
honor or that of any Venezuelan be sullied by campaigns orchestrated
from the empire," Maduro said in a speech Thursday night.
On
Friday afternoon, judge Yvonne van Wersch had emerged from a hearing on
Carvajal to announce that she would take several hours to decide whether
he had diplomatic immunity.
"I want to make my own decision," she
said. Roughly three hours later, she issued the ruling that Carvajal
remain in custody until there’s a decision in his extradition case.
Carvajal’s lawyer had sought his release.
Carvajal, who earned Chavez’s trust as a military cadet in the early 1980s, has long been a target of
U.S. law enforcement.
In
2008, he was blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury along with two other
senior military officials for allegedly providing weapons and fake
Venezuelan identity papers to Marxist rebels in Colombia so they could
travel easily across the border. The U.S. has classified the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as a terrorist
organization and has indicted its top leadership on narcotics charges.
While
Chavez always denied that officials in his government were aiding the
FARC, documents from a computer belonging to a senior rebel commander
and seized by Colombian forces in a 2008 air raid seemed to place
Carvajal front and center in what appears to have been a fluid
relationship between the rebels and Venezuela’s military.
In one
message from January 2007, the rebel leader known by his alias Ivan
Marquez recounts for fellow commanders how he met with Carvajal and
another army general and was promised delivery of 20 "very powerful
bazookas."
The indictment against Carvajal doesn’t discuss ties to
the FARC. Instead, it focuses on payments he and other senior military
officials allegedly received from Wilber Varela, one of Colombia’s
biggest kingpins before his 2008 murder in Venezuela.
Carvajal’s
attorney Chris Lejuez told The Associated Press on Friday that his
client denies all charges against him and will seek diplomatic immunity
from extradition. Even if freed, a final ruling on the U.S. extradition
request could take several days.
Carvajal was being held in the central town of Santa Cruz in Aruba. re Friday’s hearing took place.
Carvajal’s
arrest follows the indictment unsealed in southern Florida this week
against two other Venezuelan officials for allegedly working to protect
another Colombian drug trafficker.
According to a criminal
complaint, police officer Rodolfo McTurk was serving as the director of
Interpol in Venezuela when he confronted an unnamed trafficker arrested
in February 2009. After negotiations, the trafficker allegedly agreed to
pay McTurk $400,000 in cash immediately and $75,000 a month to be
released and allowed to continue his activities.
Three traffickers
told a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that
the operations could not have continued without McTurk’s help.
Each
month, McTurk allegedly went to the home of the trafficker and received
$75,000 in cash, once demanding payment in the form of armor-plated
SUVs.
The Colombian trafficker was later arrested again and extradited to the U.S.
McTurk
is believed to be residing in Venezuela but his co-defendant, Benny
Palmeri-Bacchi, was reportedly arrested last week trying to enter the
U.S. with his family for a vacation at Disney World. A former judge and
attorney, Palmeri-Bacchi pleaded not guilty at a Thursday hearing. His
attorney did not immediately return a request for comment
A spokeswoman for the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case.
___
Associated
Press writer Joshua Goodman reported this story from Bogota, Colombia,
and Dilma Arends Geerman from Oranjestad, Aruba. AP writers Christine
Armario in Miami and Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico contributed to
this report.

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