“It is normal and in many anti-drug operations coordinated by the National Court the Spanish Navy has been acting for a long time,” declared the Spanish Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, this Thursday in Brussels.
The murder of two civil guards, run over by a drug boat last Friday in the port of Barbate (Cádiz) while the public cheered the smugglers from the dock, has opened the debate on the participation of the Armed Forces in the fight against trafficking of drugs.
Assuming that the security forces are overwhelmed and that the drug mafias roam freely through the Strait of Gibraltar, voices have been heard invoking the intervention of the Army as the only instrument capable of putting a stop to the gangrene.
Vox has presented a non-legal proposal in Congress in which it asks the Government to declare the fight against drug trafficking in the Strait as “of interest to National Security [the step below the declaration of the state of alarm that was decreed during the pandemic], authorizing the deployment of the Armed Forces for this purpose.”
However, the activation of the National Security Law of 2015 does not necessarily imply the intervention of the military in the fight against drug trafficking.
And vice versa: the umbrella of this law is not essential for them to help combat it.
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In fact, as Robles recalled, the Navy has been cooperating with the security forces and the Customs Surveillance Service for years in the pursuit of narcotics smuggling.
The Navy's own website reports on operations such as the one that took place on March 15, 2013, when a Spanish warship intercepted a fishing boat loaded with two tons of cocaine 1,500 miles southwest of the Canary Islands.
The boarding was carried out by a team from the Special Operations Group (GEO) of the National Police that was aboard the Navy ship.
And there are many other examples, some as recent as last week.
Most of these operations occur in the middle of the Atlantic, where the Civil Guard patrol boats do not arrive, against vessels that transport drugs from Latin America to Africa or Europe.
The role of Navy ships is to serve as shuttles so that police agents can carry out searches ordered by the judicial authority in international waters.
Precisely, the fact that Defense requires a court order to collaborate in these approaches is one of the obstacles pointed out by the Chief Anti-Drug Prosecutor, Rosa Ana Morán, who has requested that the current collaboration protocol with the Ministry of Defense be made more flexible so that The military can intervene before the investigation is prosecuted.
But even in that case the Armed Forces would be limited to acting as auxiliaries to the security forces, providing them with transportation, providing them with the information captured by their network of radars and sensors or carrying out surveillance missions in the Strait with their maritime patrol planes.
On the other hand, expecting the military to take a step further in its involvement in the fight against drug trafficking and take center stage, displacing the police forces, means entering a very slippery slope, experts warn.
Firstly, they emphasize, because - except for military police officers - members of the Armed Forces do not have the status of agents of authority and cannot, therefore, order a ship to stop in international waters, search it against his will or detain his crew.
They are also not legally protected, since those who confront them do not commit the crime of disobedience or an attack on authority, unlike what happens with agents.
Its operating procedures are also based on the deterrent use of force.
When a suspicious vessel ignores their radio calls to stop, warships fire warning shots, getting closer to their target, until they force it to stop.
These are the rules of engagement (Roes) that govern the actions of Spanish ships deployed in the Horn of Africa, where they fight Somali pirates within the framework of the European Union's Operation Atalanta.
There, marines or members of the Special Naval Force can board pirate ships, use force to free their hostages, and detain the kidnappers.
All this without prior judicial intervention.
“The question is whether we really believe that the Strait of Gibraltar has become the Horn of Africa,” reflects a Navy commander.
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