The lawyer Nielson de Souza Vilela, defender in Spain of the former head of Venezuelan military intelligence Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, known as "el Pollo," was found dead this Thursday in the storage room of the building where he lived, in the heart of Gran Vía in Madrid, as revealed exclusively by the Spanish media The Objective.
The lawyer was around forty years old, and so far, the circumstances of his death have not been revealed, nor are there any arrests or public indications of criminal activity.
The death occurs at a time of maximum tension for his client. El Pollo Carvajal, considered one of the men with the greatest knowledge of the secrets of Chavismo, is actively cooperating with U.S. authorities after pleading guilty in June 2025 to four federal charges: conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, and drug trafficking offenses benefiting the FARC, within the framework of the so-called Cartel of the Suns.
The sentence against Carvajal, initially scheduled for October 2025 and then for February of this year, has faced successive delays. Sources close to him link these postponements directly to the information he is providing to U.S. authorities regarding the operations of the Venezuelan regime abroad, the dealings of its leaders, and the financing mechanisms of parties aligned with chavismo in various countries.
This collaboration took on an even greater dimension following the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. In December 2025, Carvajal had sent a letter to President Trump from prison in which he offered himself as a witness with insider knowledge of chavismo and accused the Cuban regime of having proposed to Hugo Chávez the use of drug trafficking as a weapon against the United States.
The Cuban connection is one of the most explosive axes of his revelations. In his unpublished memoirs, written during his imprisonment in Spain and released in September 2026, Carvajal stated that more than 20,000 Cuban agents infiltrated the Venezuelan state with Chávez's approval.
During his detention in Spain between 2021 and 2023, the former general submitted a report to the National Court in which he asserted that Cuba participated in the financing of Podemos, with routes that included cash deliveries at the Meliá Hotel in Caracas and the use of the Venezuelan diplomatic pouch.
Sources close to the former intelligence chief indicate that his statements to U.S. authorities also affect the relationship between chavismo and former Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who was charged in May 2026 in the Plus Ultra case, the investigation regarding the rescue of 53 million euros granted by the government of Pedro Sánchez to an airline linked to chavismo. Zapatero denies having been involved in that concession.
The discovery of Souza Vilela's body has immediately revived memories of another dark episode that occurred in Madrid.
In July 2019, Juan Carlos Márquez Cabrera, a former executive of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), was found dead in an industrial warehouse in San Sebastián de los Reyes just two days after declaring before the National Court his willingness to cooperate in the Morodo case, which investigated the collection of at least 4.5 million euros from PDVSA by companies linked to the son of the former Spanish ambassador in Venezuela, Raúl Morodo.
The autopsy indicated a voluntary death with no signs of third-party involvement, although the incident continued to raise questions.
As noted in The Objective, "seven years after the death of Márquez Cabrera, the death in the heart of Madrid of the lawyer who defended Pollo Carvajal in Spain has brought that episode back into conversations among former officials of PDVSA."
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