These drug traffickers had a predilection for tropical fruits, not so much because of their taste but because of their abundance in world trade.
Containers loaded with bananas or pineapples from Ecuador, for example, cross the seas by the thousands every year, sometimes with surprise.
The Police have just dismantled a network, directed from Marbella, that had "a contract" with Colombian traffickers to ship 4,000 kilos of cocaine per month to Europe, always camouflaged in boxes of fruit.
The operation has revealed that this network was the owner of 3,400 kilos of cocaine seized between 2019 and 2020 in the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Romania, Albania and Spain.
There are already 32 detainees, the majority in Ecuador, from whose port of Guayaquil drugs used to be shipped to Algeciras, and assets worth more than 40 million euros have been seized.
The first part of this network, dismantled in the so-called Operation Pampa, was detected in 2020, when the network of an Italian businessman of Argentine origin and resident in Marbella who had banana export companies in Ecuador, but also shopping centers or sport and leisure in the luxurious town of Malaga and in Granada.
All with suspicious income.
On the other side of the sea, his partner, an Albanian citizen, had fruit companies, “with a turnover of hundreds of containers exported per year.”
The two lived the good life “with million-dollar expenses” and houses in Guayaquil, Marbella or Dubai.
The gang sent the drugs in variable, although high, quantities.
But after a coup in 2020, when the Netherlands police seized 1,100 kilos of cocaine, they changed their method: small shipments of between 15 and 40 kilos of the drug, sometimes distributed in several containers to the same importer, and with the drug inserted into the structure of the container.
Image of one of the arrests in the Pampa operationCustoms Surveillance Service Tax Agency/Civil Guard/National Police (EFE/Customs Surveillance Service Tax Agency/Civil Guard/National Police)
Cocaine, generally from Colombia and Ecuador, was usually shipped from the port of Guayaquil, where the network had its cronies who made sure the containers were shipped without problems.
The business must have been going very well, because investigators emphasize that the network had "a contract with its Colombian suppliers to receive 4,000 kilos of cocaine per month, subsequently preparing the containers for shipment to various countries."
The drugs arrived in Algeciras, where other port cronies with a history of drug trafficking took them out.
Drugs are never paid with a card but with thick wads of bills, so the network had, also in Marbella, “a laundering expert.”
The investigators detected money deliveries in Barcelona between Ecuadorian citizens and the Spanish businessman's entourage, "with one million euros hidden inside a vehicle being intervened in 2021," say the National Police and the Customs Surveillance Service in a note. press
The investigation has led to the arrest of 32 people, 18 in Ecuador, one in the United Kingdom and 13 in the Spanish provinces of Málaga (7), Barcelona (2), Madrid (2), Cádiz (1) and Valencia (1).
In Ecuador, more than 2.3 million dollars, nine vehicles, nine firearms have been seized, 22 properties and multiple financial products have been seized, and six legal entities have been seized.
The analysis by the researchers has revealed laundered assets worth 36 million dollars in Ecuador and 12 million euros in Spain.