The man who would possibly testify in opposition to ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is called “el Pollo,” or “the Chicken.” His wanted poster from the United States authorities lists his top as five-foot-three. His weight, 130 kilos. His hair, “bald.”
The nickname belies his resume: former General Hugo Carvajal Barrios was as soon as Venezuela’s head of army intelligence, the equal of J. Edgar Hoover for the Hugo Chávez regime. In 2025, he pleaded guilty in federal courtroom to drug trafficking and narcoterrorism costs.
Now, as Maduro awaits trial on federal narco-terrorism costs in a Brooklyn jail, a letter Carvajal despatched to US President Donald Trump in December could sign that the ex-spy chief desires to develop into one thing aside from a defendant: an informant in opposition to his personal president.
The letter, a copy of which NCS obtained from his lawyer and was first printed in the Dallas Express, instructed US President Donald Trump that Carvajal wished to “atone” for his previous misdeeds, “so that the United States can protect itself from the dangers I witnessed for so many years.”
His letter alleges a multilayered conspiracy, together with that Maduro had labored to rig elections in the United States (Carvajal didn’t specify which elections) and conspired with brutal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to flood the US with criminals, medication and spies – claims that align neatly with a few of the costs Maduro now faces in courtroom.
Could Carvajal’s claims – and his supply to cooperate – have discovered buy in the US authorities? The letter hasn’t been publicly addressed by the US Department of Justice, however Carvajal would make a important star witness for the prosecution, with deep insider data of the interior workings of the Venezuelan state.
A scheduled sentencing listening to for Carvajal was postponed final week, and a new date has not been set – a potential “indication, though not a confirmation” that Carvajal is slicing a deal, based on New York lawyer Renato Stabile. He mentioned that it will be “highly unusual” for Carvajal’s sentencing to go forward if he’s cooperating with US authorities.
Stabile, an skilled in this division, represented former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was freed on December 1, 2025 from a 45-year jail sentence for narcotrafficking after Trump pardoned him. Carvajal despatched his letter to Trump the subsequent day.
Carvajal additionally doesn’t presently seem in the US Bureau of Prisons inmate database, although he stays in federal custody – one other potential signal of cooperation, based on Stabile.
Carvajal’s lawyer has declined to touch upon the content material of the letter or his shopper’s case . The Justice Department didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.
Carvajal was a part of Venezuela’s outdated guard, near the late President Hugo Chávez since their days in the military. The army intelligence company he ran, DCGIM, is infamous for its alleged torture and detention of regime opponents.
In 2019, he broke with Maduro, introduced his assist for opposition chief Juan Guaidó and fled to Spain. Part of a wave of dissident departures, Carvajal’s defection was akin to a dam breaking, then-US Senator Marco Rubio mentioned on the time.
In exile, Carvajal started making grandiose denunciations of Maduro on his private weblog (now taken down) and on social media. In an interview quickly after providing his assist to Guaidó, he instructed The New York Times that Maduro’s interior circle was concerned in drug trafficking and terrorism. (Maduro and the Venezuelan authorities have persistently denied these claims.)
But he was additionally in the crosshairs of the US authorities and had been for a while. In 2008, the Bush administration had sanctioned him for “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities” of FARC, a Colombian left-wing militant group.
The Justice Department filed costs in opposition to him in federal courtroom in April 2019, accusing him of trying to ship 5.6 tons of cocaine to the United States in 2006 and offering FARC with automated weapons and explosives. In Spain, Carvajal lived in hiding for a number of years, even getting plastic surgery to hide his look, till Spanish authorities extradited him to the United States in 2023.
He’s been in jail ever since.
In 2020, a 12 months after Carvajal was first indicted, Maduro and over a dozen different Venezuelan officers had been added to a superseding indictment to face comparable costs alongside the previous army intelligence chief.
Six years later, after months of army buildup in the Caribbean, the United States launched an unprecedented army operation in Venezuela, bombing Caracas and capturing Maduro and his spouse, Cilia Flores, from the Presidential Palace.
Carvajal’s title was absent from the highest of the January indictment unsealed on the morning Maduro arrived shackled in New York with Flores. But there was a new allegation that intently echoed Carvajal’s declare that Maduro had labored with Tren de Aragua to ship medication to the US.
It’s not clear whether or not Trump really learn Carvajal’s letter – his lawyer Robert Feitel instructed NCS he didn’t know, and the White House didn’t tackle NCS’s questions in regards to the letter in its response to an inquiry.
Instead, an administration spokesperson said that “Nicolás Maduro orchestrated many crimes against the United States, including sending drugs and terrorists to our country to kill Americans.”
“Fortunately, President Trump’s Department of Justice arrested Maduro for his numerous evil and illegal actions,” the assertion continued, “and he is now awaiting justice in the Southern District of New York .”
In the letter, Carvajal says as a lot, alleging that Maduro had aimed to make use of medication as a weapon in opposition to the United States. He maintains that what started beneath Chávez advanced into a construction nicknamed the Cartel de los Soles, led by Maduro and different high-ranking officers.
NCS has reached out to Maduro’s lawyer and the Venezuelan authorities for remark however has not acquired a response. Maduro has repeatedly denied the allegations that he’s concerned in drug trafficking.
Experts and former authorities officers say that the “cartel” isn’t a formally organized prison group like these in Colombia or Mexico, however reasonably a decentralized community of Venezuelan teams inside the army linked to drug trafficking.
“The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers,” Carvajal claimed. “They were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States.”
So far, neither Carvajal’s protection crew nor the US Department of Justice has publicly confirmed whether or not the previous intelligence official is cooperating with prosecutors.
But most persuasive among the many clues that Carvajal may develop into a key witness is his personal written supply to help the US.
“I fully support President Trump’s policy toward Venezuela, because it is a measure of self-defense and is based on the truth,” Carvajal wrote in his letter. “I am willing to provide additional details regarding these matters to the United States government.”