The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice declared the extradition request made by Venezuela to El Salvador for that country to send Richard Billimgs Cardozo Urribarri, prosecuted for terrorism, among other crimes, admissible.
Such decision is contained in sentence 211 drafted by magistrate Carmen Marisela Castro. Cardozo Urribarri is a member of the criminal organization founded by Guillermo Rafael Boscán Bracho (El Yiyi), who runs said group from the United States, as reported at the time by Attorney General Tarek William Saab.
A cell of that criminal organization was the one that carried out an armed attack against the local Tu Finca Exprés located in Maracaibo (Zulia) on February 18, where a worker died. The logistics operator of that attack was Cardozo, who after that fact fled to Honduras from where he was expelled to El Salvador, the country where he was arrested on April 21, according to the sentence.
When the Public Ministry learned of that arrest, it activated the extradition process based on the arrest warrant against Cardozo issued by the 3rd Court with Jurisdiction in Terrorism, where it is stated that the El Yiyi group is one of those with the “greatest impact”. negative” in Venezuela, for its “open offensives against political and economic infrastructures, causing damage to a large number of people.”
They emphasize that the organization carries out attacks on businesses with explosive devices and small arms to intimidate their owners, ordering them to pay large sums in foreign currency “which has generated the migration of businesses and the degradation of the national productive apparatus,” reflects the sentence.
The Public Ministry classifies the Yiyi group as a “Criminal Terrorist Gang” that uses telephone numbers acquired through international telecommunications companies from Colombia, Chile, Panama, Ecuador, and the United States to communicate with its victims.
The Chamber analyzed all this accumulation of documents and specified that although Venezuela does not have an extradition agreement with El Salvador, both are signatories of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo, of 2000), which creates a commitment to combat such crimes.
Based on this, the magistrates agreed to endorse Venezuela’s request for El Salvador to refer Cardozo. The Chamber made it clear that it undertakes to carry out a trial against the subject in accordance with constitutional guarantees.
