Arrested a Spanish ex-policeman who acted as a 'capo' of drug trafficking logistics in West Africa

Miguel Ángel Devesa Mera, arrested along with his wife, also arrested, last Monday in Ivory Coast.

The name of Miguel Ángel Devesa Mera, a 52-year-old former police officer from Vigo, appears linked to planes loaded with thousands of kilos of cocaine that took off from Venezuela and landed in Mali, with beheadings and dismemberment of alleged Colombian drug traffickers in the Malian capital, Bamako, and, in general, with the African drug route for more than ten years.

Devesa Mera was the

of the logistics of drug trafficking in Africa.

It was until last Monday, when he was arrested in a joint operation by the National Police and the Ivory Coast authorities as the head of one of the largest cocaine introduction networks in Europe from Latin America through the African continent "in planes , boats and semi-submersibles.

The police calculate that “between 50 and 60 tons of narcotic substance” passed through this route annually.

The arrest was made public this Friday.

When he was a police officer, Devesa Mera was assigned to Vigo (Pontevedra) and Madrid, but in 2002 he was expelled from the Corps, after accumulating several disciplinary files.

Then, he went to live in Africa, and settled in Mali as a businessman, and traveled to Galicia relatively frequently, "although for short periods of time", say the researchers from the Central Unit for Drugs and Crime and Organized (Udyco) , who had been following in his footsteps for many years.

"It also appeared related to Sito Miñanco in 2018", when the legendary Galician narco fell for the last time, in the framework of Operation Mito, "after meeting with him on several occasions", the same sources point out.

An altercation between one of his Colombian partners and a prostitute in a hotel in the port town of San Pedro, in the Ivory Coast, has this time led the Ivorian authorities to Devesa Mera.

In a hotel room, the agents found 168 kilos of cocaine, and at the headquarters of the company from Vigo, in the same town, another 1,800.

Knowing that he was discovered, the former police officer tried to flee the country with his mother, his wife and their son, but was arrested along with his wife while trying to cross the border.

Two days later, another of the organization's leaders, the Basque Aitor Picabes Carnes, was arrested.

In total, ten people belonging to the same criminal group have been arrested.

Links with Al Qaeda

The network had direct contact with members of the Al Qaeda branch in Mali, Groups for the Support of Islam of Muslims (JNIM), whom they financed in exchange for giving security to the shipments, the investigators say.

To that end, the key person for most of the time they have operated in the area has been Colombian David Cardona-Cardona, who was a partner of Devesa Mera until he was detained by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in 2019. Cardona, also related to arms trafficking, was accused in Mali in 2011, along with the man from Vigo, of the murder of another Colombian citizen whom they tried to dismember and make disappear in Bamako in 2009.