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The long shadow of narco corruption: an infiltrated agent is expelled from the Civil Guard

2022-07-02T21:27:47.875Z


The Supreme Court rules that a guard convicted of leaking investigations in Galicia must leave the force for "sabotaging" the UCO and putting colleagues and confidants at serious risk


Information is the main strategy in the war against drug trafficking that has been waged for five decades.

The objective of the police is to seize shipments while the drug trafficker tries to avoid the loss of his valuable raw material at any price.

In this intersection of interests there are no coincidences, but a constant mutual espionage where infiltrated agents and confiding drug traffickers move on a dangerous board risking their lives or falling into corruption.

This is the case of former agent Javier López Suárez, whose sanction has been ratified by the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court, which entails the expulsion of the Civil Guard for having leaked and “sabotaged” information on operations to Galician drug traffickers.

Despite the conviction, the 38-year-old agent assigned to the Judicial Police, who had access to confidential information from the ECO and EDOA units of the armed institute from the Pontevedra command office and disrupted dozens of police operations that had been put into March from 2013, he intended to continue wearing the uniform.

But the Supreme has dismissed his appeal against the resolution of the Minister of Defense of January 20, 2021 by which he agreed to the expulsion of the guard.

Defense considered the agent to be the author of a crime of revealing secrets, which "causes serious damage to the Administration, citizens or entities with legal personality", provided for in the Disciplinary Regime of the Civil Guard.

The sentence states that the agent's conduct was diverted to neutralize the investigations carried out by the Organized Crime Team (UCO) when his professional duty forced him to pursue them.

“The dignity of the Civil Guard is clearly harmed by the conviction of one of its members for a crime of revealing secrets, which is expressive of the abandonment of the qualities of integrity and dignity that society presumes in the members of the institute. armed”, proclaims the court, which considers the sanction imposed to be proportionate due to the nature of the crime committed.

It refers to the "frontal opposition" of the agent "to the duties of rectitude, integrity and respect for the law required of the members of the Civil Guard", he emphasizes.

Confident with a great projection

The sentence of the Court of Pontevedra of June 2018 sentenced the guard Javier López Suárez and his partner Diego Fontán, 39 years old and son of another agent of the information services, to the minimum sentence of three years in prison and two of Disqualification compared to the 11 requested by the Prosecutor's Office, with absolute disqualification for both defendants.

The ruling only appreciated a crime of revealing secrets and not that of joining a criminal group together with the confidants to whom they passed information.

The court concluded that the agents leaked confidential information, but it was not sufficiently proven that the data in question "was exclusive material of the controls", nor that the files of confidants or license plates of camouflaged vehicles that the defendants drove were properly protected.

López and Fontán were discovered after an internal investigation by the information services of the Civil Guard.

The investigations began after in just six months, between January and July 2013, up to four ongoing investigations had been frustrated, some judicialized, against drug gangs operating from the south of Pontevedra.

The “double agents”, who had access to sensitive material, both computerized and photographic, used a suspected drug trafficker from Vilanova de Arousa, Juan Carlos Santorum Navazas, who was in charge of acting as a messenger and liaison between the agents and the investigated traffickers.

The bulk of the confidential information was thus transferred to a second-tier trafficker, who acted as an intermediary for the organizations and was sentenced to two years in prison for it.

The correveidile between agents and drug traffickers became the target of large police operations such as the one that disrupted in 2020: the landing of a stash of 4,000 kilos of cocaine

that transported the

Karar

ship in the middle of the pandemic and for which it is prosecuted.

The information accumulated by Santorum, an expert in obtaining leaks, placed him in the focus of the best informed sources of drug trafficking.

Agent Javier López accessed all the confidential information that he then passed on to his partner, who in turn filtered it to Santorum, who sold it to the highest bidder, according to the investigation.

Reports, operations, follow-ups, orders to request telephone taps, a list of agents and their confidants or any document processed before the courts reached the hands of the drug traffickers.

Some 2,000 confidential writings were found on agent Diego Fontán's computer, while some 500 files related to anti-drug services and their activities were recovered from the alleged trafficker's computer.

The now expelled guard who has resisted leaving the Civil Guard "leaked relevant and sensitive information about the actions that affected them to those investigated for drug trafficking in various operations, frustrating their arrest and facilitating their impunity," says the Supreme Court.

“He leaked the list of confidants with all his personal data, causing a serious risk to his integrity;

he leaked the specific information that these informants had provided to the Civil Guard;

he leaked the personal and reserved data of the members of his unit, also putting them in danger;

and leaked confidential information from the Organized Crime and Anti-Drug Team of the Organic Unit of the Pontevedra Judicial Police”, the ruling abounds.

Justice underlines that "for at least six months he sabotaged the investigative work of the Galician Civil Guard Organized Crime Team and put his colleagues and confidants at serious risk."

"It is difficult to imagine a greater damage to the Civil Guard as a State security body in the prosecution of crime and this serious damage to the Administration could not be more evident," he adds.

For this reason, the court emphasizes that "the behavior of the appellant collides head-on with the duties of honesty and probity that his membership in the Civil Guard requires, of whose members a plus of morality and ethics is preached, which is required of all members of the Armed Forces and the Civil Guard.

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Source: elparis

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