The death of two civil guards run over by a drug boat on Friday, February 9, in the port of Barbate has shaken the entire society.
Including the drug traffickers themselves.
“This makes no sense,” some of the drug traffickers who share occupation and territory with whom, boarding the drug boat, fatally headed toward the agents' zodiac, have told lawyer Manuel Morenete.
As if a trailer hit a Vespino motorcycle.
Morenete is a criminal lawyer from Algeciras specialized in the defense of people accused of crimes related to drug trafficking.
He has been at it for more than 15 years and knows that world and those who inhabit it well.
His clients assure him that they cannot explain what happened, that it is something that obviously harms the business, that harms everyone.
“The one that is going to get involved now,” they predict, alluding, surely, to the police repression that is coming.
They are surprised, above all, that the crew of the drug boat did not try to flee from the members of the Civil Guard, or even get away from them.
They simply made fun of the agents by bullfighting the zodiac.
“When they saw that the zodiac was very small, they began to laugh at them, to chase it around the port,” describes the lawyer.
Until, fed up with the game, the drug traffickers attacked the civil guards at full power.
This mixture of brutality and absence of commercial logic is something recent.
A civil guard based in La Línea explains: “I understand that if the drug traffickers, in a drug boat, find themselves cornered, they try to escape by going over whatever it is.
That falls within the rules.
But this… I don't understand this.”
It is not even the first time this has happened: in December, a Customs Surveillance patrol was harassed near Sanlúcar by two drug boats dangerously loaded to the brim with gasoline drums.
It was the world upside down, the mouse chasing the cat.
“They laugh at us.
The principle of authority no longer exists,” says Ricardo Fernández, spokesperson for the Association of Customs Surveillance Officials of the Campo de Gibraltar.
A senior police officer also adds an additional and key circumstance: “For the first time we see them with the will to kill.”
The universe of drug trafficking in the Strait will be different after the death of those two civil guards.
Or maybe it already was and no one had noticed.
The drug boats harassed the Civil Guard squad in the port of Barbate on Friday, February 9.
In the 70s and 80s, hashish drug trafficking was limited to Barbate and its region, it was governed by a few family clans and was carried out in a somewhat artisanal way in wooden boats.
Between 2000 and 2018, thanks to the money that never stops flowing, the clans became professional, the territory expanded until they were established throughout the Campo de Gibraltar and the mafias grew to acquire considerable economic power.
At the same time, his power of intimidation also increased.
In February 2018, a group of hooded men entered the La Línea de la Concepción hospital and forcibly took away a member of the gang who, after being arrested, was convalescing there and guarded by two police officers;
Months later, a child died after being hit by a drug boat in an accident on a beach in Algeciras.
These two incidents, plus the feeling of growing gravity and impunity that floated in the area (the “principle of authority” was already broken at that time for the first time) decided the Ministry of the Interior to deploy an unusual device: the Operations Coordination Body against Drug Trafficking (OCON-Sur): 150 released and coordinated agents capable of carrying out large operations with hundreds of detainees in each raid.
In full success, in September 2022, the deployment subsided.
The Civil Guard then defended that it was nothing more than a reconversion.
Other versions never officially confirmed spoke of the economic costs involved in its operation and the suspicions that arose with the area's commanders, upset at not knowing or being able to control this unit.
Another factor to take into account: months after the lock, the head of the organization, Lieutenant Colonel David Oliva, and two other commanders were accused of bribery and revelation of secrets in a judicial case yet to be resolved.
The police devices, therefore, lost effectiveness.
But one of the consequences of the implementation of OCON-Sur during those four years was that the geography of drug trafficking expanded in search of new, less guarded entry routes: Huelva, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the Guadalquivir, the South of Portugal, Almería... Another, that the arrests of the clan leaders (Los Castaña, Los Chacón...) disintegrated and atomized the mafia clans, leaving free spaces for members of middle and lower cadres to see their opportunity and jump to occupy higher positions in the hierarchy. .
They are younger, more undisciplined, more impulsive, less intelligent, less expert.
Capable of attacking a Civil Guard zodiac without a clear reason.
According to lawyer Morenete, “these people now have fewer limits, less respect for authority.”
Setting up a drug boat in the Strait is neither easy nor cheap.
It requires an organized and hierarchical infrastructure.
You have to build the boat, 12 or 14 meters long, hire a mechanic to install the four or five outboard motors, then rent a truck with the necessary capacity to transport it hidden (this type of boat has been prohibited by law since 2018). ) and leave it on a deserted beach without surveillance where it can be landed with the help of a tractor without anyone seeing it.
Once at sea, the drug boat will never return to land: in the middle of the Strait, alongside others, the sailors who crew it will await instructions from the leaders of the gang to collect the hashish from Morocco in a specific place and then unload it in another place on the Spanish coast.
If necessary, they will remain in the water for weeks or months.
They receive supplies from the coast.
They relieve each other.
Sometimes they incorporate small tents where they sleep.
They will only move if a storm threatens them.
That is what pushed six drug boats to take refuge in the port of Barbate last week.
There are four people on a drug boat at most: the pilot, the
gepero
(in charge of consulting the GPS) and one or two sailors.
In addition to these, the mafias have a boss, several lieutenants and, at the bottom of the pyramid, the
petaqueros
(in charge of transporting gasoline and food to those who live in the drug boat), those who collect hashish on the beach and the
dots
, usually children or adolescents, whose task is to warn if the police are coming.
Civil Guard agents seize a drug boat.
Civil Guard
Almost all of them, those before and now, bosses and subordinates, come from La Línea (62,000 inhabitants), the town with the highest unemployment rate in Spain (29.3%).
They were born in the three poorest neighborhoods of this punished city: Los Junquillos, Las Palomeras and La Atunara.
Some of these drug traffickers, with the fortunes they have acquired, have built small mansions in El Zogal, another marginal and dangerous neighborhood, but with rustic land to build buildings of striking luxury.
Those who know them because they have been living with them for many years assure that even if they earn tens of thousands of euros, they do not cut their roots with their neighborhoods of origin, where their families are, they do not emigrate to Marbella or Malaga, they limit themselves to living from day to day, spend in one week what they earn in another.
There is a small drug culture in the Strait: songs about drug boat trips that are shared on the Tik Tok social network, a particular way of dressing in sportswear from expensive brands, an almost youthful and shared ostentation.
A civil guard from La Línea usually sees teenagers in the gym with 2,000 euro Louis Vuitton backpacks and every time he sees them he thinks the same thing.
In Los Junquillos, next to cars a step away from the scrapyard that cover a window without glass with plastic bags, there is parked a fiery red Mini that stands out as if it were illuminated.
In 2016, a well-known drug trafficker from La Línea,
El Potito
, sponsored the wedding of his sister,
La Princesa
, who rode in a carriage through the city in an eye-catching white jeweled dress.
At the banquet, literally cartloads of prawns were served.
The bitter face
There is another, much more bitter side that comes from the same place, the one embodied by the lowest links in the chain, the
pawns
, the cannon fodder.
The sample is Daniel Grande, 45 years old, born in Los Junquillos into a family that encouraged him to study.
Today he is a psychologist and educator and has been helping young people in this area for 22 years with a municipal program that he himself has named Argonauta.
Like the drug traffickers, he has not wanted to go very far from the neighborhood either.
“My question is, do these kids decide to be there, on a drug boat?
There are children whose parents, cousins, brothers and friends are in drug trafficking.
There are children who go to school in the morning when their parents are still in bed because they have been partying.
Do they really choose to be there, on the drug boat? ”He asks himself.
While he does so, on a walk through Los Junquillos, two 10-year-old boys riding bicycles approach him and ask him if there is going to be a soccer game this week.
At that age everyone wants to be a teacher, lawyer or soccer player.
But in a few years things change.
When they give you 20 euros and a telephone so you can go up on a roof and tell if the police are coming to a stash of tobacco, or 1,000 euros to keep an eye on a stash of hashish, you feel like the king of the neighborhood,” he adds.
That's why, with invincible morale and determination, Grande organizes soccer games, morning hikes, and trips to the multiplex so that children like the ones she just crossed paths with learn other things in order to keep them away from selling drugs.
“It is an equation that is influenced by personality, family and job opportunities,” he explains.
Many times it doesn't turn out well.
In May 2021, a 19-year-old young man from La Línea died after drowning while he was working as a
petaquero
in a small boat.
Grande had known him since he was little: “I knew the life he had led, how terrible it had been, what was hidden behind it.
The family weighs a lot in the equation.
It is a condemned way of living.
I recently saw his brother.
He is awaiting trial, also for drug trafficking.
I don't judge them, I don't give them life lessons.
I just try to weigh other factors in that equation for when they have to decide.”
“Repression is good,” he adds, “but it is not the solution.”
Meanwhile, from the other side, a police source cries: “We need means and we need them now.
Perhaps it is not time for the OCON device to return, but it is time for an increase in staff numbers.
We need means and support from politicians.
It takes us days to do what drug traffickers organize in just hours.
And we are discovering more and more cocaine.
And that is very dangerous".
Legal sources point out another problem: judicial jam.
Collapsed courts multiply with judges who are passing through and saturated prosecutors' offices.
The instructions are extremely slow due to the avalanche of appeals filed by defense lawyers, who are protected by the judicial system.
The result is sentences that sometimes end up being acquittal or reduced due to invalidation of evidence and mitigating circumstances due to delay.
“It is not about stopping many;
but to condemn many,” warns a judicial source.
Lawyer Morenete replies: “I have nothing to defend my client other than the Penal Code and the law, and if the law allows me to appeal, my obligation is to do so.”
Sitting in his office in Algeciras on a stormy afternoon this week, this lawyer comments that after what happened in Barbate, many lower-level drug traffickers with whom he has contacted confess that they are scared.
“Many are scared to go into the water.”
And he adds that someone will have to resign.
“No one forces them, only circumstances, and if they don't want to, then they don't do it.
Now, the boss can tell him, maybe I won't call you again, and there is no money!”
And he adds, with a fatalism greater than that of the Grande educator: “And the boss calls another.
Because the hashish has to enter.
And because there is always another.”
A block of apartments in the Las Palomeras neighborhood, in La Línea de la Concepción.
Marcos Moreno
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