Authorities battle drug gangs in neglected South

LA LINEA DE LA CONCEPCION, Spain — Faces hidden by masks and hoods, a group of 40 men emerge from the darkness of beachfront houses and step into the sand as a state-of-the-art speedboat approaches the shore. They frantically unload dozens of plastic-wrapped burlap bundles, each containing 66 pounds of Moroccan hashish.

Then, somebody yells: “Cut it! Cut it!”

As fast as they came, the smugglers find shelter in the narrow streets of the La Atunara fishing neighborhood. The boat vanishes into the night, still holding half of its cargo. When a patrol car arrives seconds later, all that remains is the sound of the waves.

Another night, another chapter in the battle between Spanish authorities and the crime gangs who have turned this neglected town in the shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar into a key European entry point for Moroccan cannabis resin.

“Right now, we are losing this battle,” said Francisco Mena, leader of Nexos, a federation of local community action groups. “Trafficking can’t be stopped with the human resources and material means that we have in place.”

He insisted the war could still be won. But such optimism flies in the face of the brazen drug operations witnessed by Associated Press journalists, and of the very words of drug chieftains who agreed to rare interviews.

“Trafficking has always existed, and it always will. If not here, it will move elsewhere along the coast,” said one of the area’s most notorious “narcos,”who like others spoke on condition that they not be named because they feared prosecution.

Half a dozen trafficking ring members and their leaders said that shipping drugs is a way of life in this forgotten corner. In a province with a 30 percent jobless rate, the highest in the country, they see their criminal activity as a “necessary bad” feeding hundreds of families directly and thousands more indirectly.

“Many of us are fathers. We need to take food home,” said another gangster who asked to be identified as Pepe. “If we couldn’t provide for our children this way, another kind of violence would come.”

Three dozen clans are believed to be working in Campo de Gibraltar, a county of 268,000 that cradles the Bay of Algeciras.