As of: February 26, 2024, 8:00 a.m
By: Judith Finsterbusch
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The Guardia Civil is trying to combat drug trafficking in the south of Spain - now two police officers have been killed by the mafia.
© dpa (symbol photo)
There are only a few ridiculous kilometers between Morocco and Spain on the Strait of Gibraltar.
There has always been smuggling here, today mainly hashish.
The death of two police officers in Barbate reveals a new level of violence among the drug mafias who pursue their lucrative business and who are never short of staff.
Barbate - It's so tempting: ride around on a moped one night, use the walkie-talkie to announce where the police are patrolling, collect 600 euros, if things go well, even 1,000.
And then just wait for the next call.
Why study for school, get your degree and then work for 1,000 euros a month?
Puntos are the names of these young people who drive their mopeds along the coast of the province of Cadiz in the southernmost tip of Spain, while hashish packets from Morocco cross the Strait of Gibraltar to reach Spain and thus Europe.
Drug trafficking in the south of Spain: coastal town of Barbate defends itself against a bad image
Such a drug boat, called
narcolancha
in Spanish , ran over a Civil Guard dinghy at the port of Barbate on February 9th, as can be seen on videos and the investigating judge also assumes, with full intention.
Two police officers were killed and another was seriously injured; the police union speaks of murder.
Meanwhile, people stood at the harbor pier in the Andalusian coastal town cheering on the crew of the drug boat and cursing the Guardia Civil in particular and the police in general.
Since the incident, the small town in Andalusia with its 23,000 inhabitants has been on everyone's lips. Television and radio teams from all over Spain talk to the residents, most of whom want to remain anonymous.
The memory of the 90s, when drug lord Antón Vázquez walked through the streets here with his lion cub on a golden chain, is still too fresh.
Today Barbate is different, first the fishing went down the drain, unfortunately, then the drug trade, thank God.
The unemployment rate has fallen from 53 to 27 percent, says mayor Miguel Molina like a mantra into the microphones: “Barbate is an honest, modest little coastal village that does not want to return to the past and will develop into a tourism reference.” And that, Those who killed two police officers on February 9th weren't even from Barbate, he adds.
First tobacco, then hashish: why the drug trade is flourishing in the south of Spain
Smuggling has always taken place in the Strait of Gibraltar, whose narrowest point is only 14.4 kilometers between Africa and Europe.
Once it was tobacco, today it is mainly hashish from Morocco, but increasingly cocaine from South America, since the controls in the large ports in Galicia and later Algeciras, where the police repeatedly confiscate huge amounts of cocaine and arrest mafia bosses .
Barbate may have made the jump, at least in part, but other coastal towns in the south of Spain remain drug hotspots, especially La Línea de la Concepción, Gibraltar's direct neighbor.
La Línea is the city with the highest unemployment rate in Spain, at 35 percent in January.
At least 4,000 of the 63,000 residents are dedicated to drug trafficking, says Francisco Mena, who has been fighting drug trafficking in the Campo de Gibraltar for decades with the “Alternativas” association.
His motto: Police officers alone are not enough; alternatives are needed for young people so that they don't fall into the clutches of the drug mafia in the first place.
“Your future is determined more by the zip code of the place you are born than by your genetic code,” says Mena.
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Where drug lords are revered: La Línea is Spain's city with the highest unemployment
In La Línea, says the Spaniard, the drug lords are happy to pay the poorest people's electricity bills or Christmas presents for their children, while they send their own offspring to expensive private schools.
An entire urbanization in La Línea is popularly known as Villa Narco, a residential area full of illegally built luxury chalets owned by drug lords who live there behind high walls and are revered like modern-day Robin Hoods by the city's youth.
From here they coordinate a perfectly organized drug trafficking team, like a large international corporation.
The next step on the career ladder for the
puntos
, those boys (and increasingly girls) who drive dope on their mopeds, is the position of
braceros
: teenagers who unload the drug boats on the beach and drag the hashish packets to the waiting truck.
Depending on the load, 15 to 20 such “load carriers” are in use, it has to be done quickly and is risky, but there are up to 2,500 euros per load per nose.
Career in the drug mafia in Spain: Perfectly organized clans
In the next salary bracket are the
transportistas
, who drive the delivery trucks with the hash on board, they receive up to 20,000 euros per load that they take to the so-called
guarderías
, storage facilities from which the drugs are eventually picked up and transported throughout Spain be distributed across Europe.
Anyone who makes their house or garage
available as
a guardería collects up to 60,000 euros per order.
The hashish is usually transported from the storage facilities by road - but here too there are exceptions, such as the spectacular chase of a drug boat off the Costa Blanca.
In addition to the jobs on land that the mafia generates, there are other positions on the sea that need to be filled in order to organize the lucrative drug trade.
At the top of the payroll there are the drivers who steer the drug speedboats, with up to 50,000 euros per job.
Since 2018, these incredibly fast and powerful rigid inflatable boats have been banned for private use in Spain.
To illustrate: the drug boat used to kill the police officers in Barbate was 14 meters long and had 4 outboard motors of 200 hp each.
Weighing 5 tons, the boat can transport up to 3 tons of hashish.
The Guardia Civil boat, as a comparison, was 6 meters long and had exactly one engine, 60 hp.
New willingness to use violence among drug traffickers in Spain?
But back to the drug trade on the coast of Andalusia: On the open sea, the pilot and his companions sometimes wait for days for the okay that the hashish can be picked up in Morocco and delivered to a remote beach in Spain.
During this time, the boat crew is supplied with food and gasoline from land - another tempting opportunity for errand boys who fill the shopping cart in the supermarket with energy drinks and fast food.
Drugs are brought ashore in Spain in such speedboats.
(Symbolic photo) © Guardia Civil
As I said, smuggling has always existed here, as in other parts of Spain.
What has changed is the willingness of the
narcos
to use violence , who, as in the case of Barbate, are no longer fleeing from the police, but are instead keeping up with it.
“For the first time we see that the drug traffickers are willing to kill,” a Guardia Civil official - who of course remained anonymous - told the newspaper “El País”.
There have always been power games; in 2018, for example, 20 drug clan members stormed the hospital in La Línea to get one of their own out who had been injured during his arrest.
Huge special operation against drug trafficking in Spain failed - due to corruption
At that time, Spain's Interior Ministry reacted with a special operation against drug trafficking in the Campo de Gibraltar: The famous Ocon-Sur, 150 Guardia Civil officers strong, systematically took action against the mafias on the Andalusian coast starting in 2018, arresting almost 20,000 within four years Suspects confiscated over 676 tons of hashish in 2021 alone.
The arrest of Ocon Sur boss David Oliva followed in the summer of 2022.
He is said to have had connections to drug lords, was seen at fiestas and is said to have revealed secrets.
His highly specialized employees were placed in other departments of the Guardia Civil. Madrid provided 37 million euros for a “special plan”, but Ocon-Sur was history and the special plan expires in 2025.
The enormous police presence and the arrest of important drug lords between 2018 and 2022 had consequences on the coast of Cádiz, also in terms of personnel. Many of the veterans are in prison, while younger, wilder, and more inexperienced people sensed their chance and took up leadership positions in order to maintain the drug trade.
Criminal lawyer Manuel Morenete, who has been representing drug lords and their henchmen from Cádiz for 15 years, told El País: “Those who are here now hardly know any boundaries, they have no respect for authority.”
After the incident in Barbate, the Spanish police unions are not only demanding the resignation of Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, but also more resources, more material, more personnel on the coast of Cádiz - as are the courts, which are not keeping up with the processes .
Just like the residents of the small towns on the coast of Cadiz, they feel left alone by politics here, in the no man's land between two continents and far from Madrid.