Olive farmers fight thieves targeting their ‘liquid gold’

With good prices available for the best virgin oils, locals in central Spain fear ‘a mafia’ is fuelling theft

TO the families who depend on the olive groves of Extremadura in central Spain, the oil they produce is “liquid gold”. While it is a vital harvest that sustains them, however, it has also attracted mafia-backed thieves.

But now, after a year of relentless night-time raids, the local farmers are fighting back. “We’ve always had some thieving here, but I’ve never seen anything like this – looting has become the order of the day,” said Antonio Masa Cañada, who spent most of Christmas not with his family but out on patrol.

In the 4,000-strong village of Navalvillar de Pela, where almost every family has a clutch of trees, the Christmas carol service took place at 3am around a bonfire lit to keep the locals warm as they defended their crops.

Mr Masa Cañada’s wife, Rosa Arroyo Baviano, admits that the family Christmas was spoiled for the couple’s 14year-old son, Sergio. “But this is our living,” she adds. “We don’t have a life at the minute; you come home from picking, have a shower and then go out again on patrol.”

In recent weeks, as the olives began to ripen, the toll on growers has been extreme as mainly Romanian and Bulgarian thieves have taken advantage of unseasonably clement nights to strip entire groves, beating the fruit from the trees with long poles and carting off sackfuls to sell on the black market.

In just one night in mid-November, 26,000kg were stripped from the trees, a haul worth €15,600 (£11,500) at the rate paid by the local San Isidro co-operative to its 300 members this season. Once processed, the best virgin oils fetch €4 a kilo.

Mr Masa Cañada, 43, set up his crimebusting group in April, but it was only when the number of thefts increased as harvest time approached that the initiative caught on. “Once we showed people that the thieves could be caught, things changed,” he said. Now up to 40 people, using a dozen vehicles, head out on patrols from 8pm, communicating via a WhatsApp group chat.

“People come during the day to choose where to steal from. They mark the trees for later,” said Mr Masa Cañada, recalling how last week a patrol managed to catch seven people redhanded after a 100mph car chase down winding country lanes.

But with only one Civil Guard patrol car in a region some 40 miles wide, jubilation soon turned to frustration when the thieves, who were found with 218kg of freshly picked olives in their van, were released within hours, to appear in court at a later date. “They won’t turn up at court. It’s pathetic,” said Mr Masa Cañada.

He fears there is a risk that some farmers might take matters into their own hands, despite his warnings that they should follow the law. “This is a powder keg and it’s about to go off. Imagine what could happen if the wrong person finds someone stealing in a very remote spot… And we will be in the news as the village where someone got lynched.”

The thefts have also caused tensions between small family growers and large producers, who they suspect of “laundering” stolen olives by mixing them in with their own crops before taking them for processing. “We think there is a mafia behind this. Clearly, if they steal olives, someone is buying the stuff,” said Mr Masa Cañada.

Out on patrol in a battered Peugeot Partner, Paco, a veteran olive farmer who preferred not to reveal his surname, said that if those buying stolen olives could be stopped, the problem would end. In the meantime, he is optimistic about the patrols, saying: “We reacted slowly, but in the end we got out here, and it’s working. The thieves know we are here.”