“You know what I'm telling you, that I have thought better of it and, yes, put my name and also my last name. It is enough that in this town we pay the righteous for sinners.”
Narciso Corrales, owner of the La Tienda bar in the old town of Barbate that he runs with his family, came out of the kitchen and caught this reporter on the fly who was already leaving through the door.
Before he said what many think: “This is a worthy town.” Serious after the empty bar, the bursting refrigerators and the kegs of beer crowded together waiting for another carnival. “The four here don't carry those boats. “It was very clear that those undesirables were not from the town.”
But those who gasped enthusiastically at them were from Barbate. "Already. But do you think those four screaming kids knew that it could end in tragedy? ”She answers with a question.
In his bar, as in the rest of the small Cadiz town of 22,000 inhabitants, there are barely four cats on the streets. The murder of two civil guards who on Friday night were attacked by a glider that had sought refuge from the Karlotta storm in the port, has left the town silent. An uncomfortable silence to which very few put words.
The City Council suspended all activities scheduled for a carnival that started precisely on Saturday with several events and the parade of the street groups, the neighborhood groups that tour the town with their troupes and chirigotas. And the four neighbors who left their houses for a walk tried to turn pages, gawking in front of the television screens that in all the bars were broadcasting the Real Madrid match against Girona.
The port of Barbate has several docks and a large wall, like the sea wall in Havana, but much higher. Dozens, many dozens of young and not so young people from the town gathered there on Friday, arriving burning rubber from cars or doing wheelies on their motorcycles with the exhaust pipe manipulated to make noise.
But who warned? The storm continues and the wind whips cold and humid in the port, half a dozen young people approach the wall on motorcycles, just in front of the dam where the small rubber boat in which the six civil guards were riding was run over. They agree to speak, but on the condition that they not be identified. They are all of legal age.
“We come here a lot. “It’s an easy meeting point when there’s nothing to do.” Another adds that on Friday the first images of the ambush in which six rubbers participated began to circulate on WhatsApp groups. “We also didn't have anything better to do and half the town came here,” adds another.
So many people came that the access road between the port sheds was blocked by cars and motorcycles in a caravan, and in fact it made it difficult for the first Civil Guard vehicles to arrive when they received the first news of the tragedy.
There were few people on Saturday and the screams and gasps of the previous night echoed in those blood-stained waters. “Attack him! There, with two balls! Faggots! You're going to drown them! But where are you going with that shit. Well, with what they have, what do you want them to do?
“I didn't scream,” says one. “Me neither,” the other rushes. Well, someone must have screamed, because in the videos, which appear more and more, you can hear the mockery, and this absolute lack of respect for authority.
“In the end, those who screamed should not have thought that they would be killed,” they all conclude, admitting that they feel “ashamed” of the image that can now be had of their people. And they acknowledge that yesterday they did not go to the demonstration that was held in the town and which was attended by hundreds of neighbors who chanted slogans against drug traffickers and in favor of the Civil Guard.
The town is shocked, dismayed. Many threw their hands up to insist on the disproportionate means with which drug traffickers and civil guards operate.
The event is already under judicial investigation, but there were many who yesterday questioned what a GEAS boat, the aquatic activities group of the Civil Guard, was doing, trying to identify the occupants of the six drug boats that had sought refuge in Barbate. The GEAS boat is the zodiac that always travels on top of the group's vehicle and that they move wherever they go to carry out a rescue.
A six-meter Zodiac with an 80-horsepower outboard motor that tried to cope with six fourteen-meter tires, fiberglass, and four motors of 350 horsepower each. Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska assured in Cádiz that the performance of the civil guards was exemplary and that the tragedy had nothing to do with the material. The civil guards assigned to the Barbate barracks and who this Saturday bit the knuckles of their closed hand out of contained rage do not have the same opinion.
The silence was resounding. She had to put aside her anger, indignation and helplessness to mourn her murdered colleagues, and accompany the other four wounded. But someone had to give the order for a rubber rescue boat to be used on a dam with four drug boats that had been anchoring and burning diesel since early in the morning. Someone who must have thought that to compensate for the disproportion of the boats, the GEAS could be accompanied by two civil guards from the GAR, the rapid action group based in Logroño that sends people to the countryside of Gibraltar every fifteen days to participate in the fight against drug trafficking. In fact, the GAR agents boarded the boat with their weapons, a short gun on their belts and assault rifles with which they tried to stop the drug boat when they saw that it was charging at them. Hence, the three port workers who witnessed the tragedy from the dredgers and who also recorded the scene with their cell phones, there is a moment when they scream because they hear gunshots.
David Pérez Carracero was 43 years old, had two children, was born in Barcelona and was a member of the GAR. Miguel Ángel González Gómez was 39 years old, from San Fernando, Cádiz, he belonged to the GEAS. Both will be fired today with pain, helplessness, anger and the applause of many good people of Barbate.
