The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Struggle goes on to stop drug smuggling in fishing town
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-theart speedboat approaches the shore. They frantically unload dozens of plasticwrapped 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. On a clear day, the contours of the coast of Morocco, the world’s top producer of hashish, are visible across a busy shipping waterway at the mouth of the Mediterranean, less than 19 miles away.
A new generation of bolder gangsters is challenging underfunded law enforcement agencies, as local families watch their teenagers lured into a life of easy money.
Criminals that in the past dropped their few hundred kilograms of cargo in the sea as soon as they came across a customs surveillance boat are now ready to defend their bigger, bulkier shipments.
On land and at sea, traffickers use shuttle vehicles — SUVs or inflatable boats without cargo whose function is to mislead authorities and, increasingly, ram patrol cars and boats.
“The earlier generation had a respect for police uniform but there is now a new generation that has an absolute contempt for authority,” says Juan Franco, the mayor of La Linea, “My worry is that these guys are armed and so far, they are not using them against civil guard or police agents, but that’s the next step.”
Fears that civilians could also be caught in the crossfire reached a height last month when a group of drug traffickers stormed the emergency ward in La Linea’s public hospital. The assailants freed a top aide and nephew to Los Castanitas, two brothers who run the town’s most influential drug clans.
A week after the attack, the country’s Interior Minister descended on the town with an entourage of bodyguards and special police forces. Juan Ignacio Zoido promised crime squads and additional security measures for the county over coming months. The smugglers take umbrage at their reputation as a violent, fractured community.