The death of two civil guards after being run over by a drug boat in the port of Barbate has served the opposition to repeat, as an element of political fray, the dissolution of OCON-Sur, the Civil Guard operation to fight against drug trafficking. drugs in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Popular Party and Vox, which the associations of the armed institute embrace, are preparing a parliamentary offensive against the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, whom they accuse of dismantling without explanation a wrongly called “elite unit.” However, behind the end of this special device – which went practically unnoticed after the summer of 2022 – the lights mixed with the shadows that now no one wants to remember: a personalist leader who ended up prosecuted for corruption, a hidden war with the National Police or inflated operations to grab headlines.
The idea of the coordination body against drug trafficking (OCON) arose during Juan Ignacio Zoido's mandate in the Interior, but did not materialize because the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy got in the way. The then recently arrived magistrate of the National Court of the Interior set his priority as restoring the principle of authority in the south of Spain, providing millions to the fight against drug trafficking.
Each police force with its own strategy. In the National Police they surrounded the traffickers, also with countless successes, through the drug and organized crime unit (UDyCO), and the Civil Guard devised a temporary structure in which its agents would be on secondment - available 24 hours a day, seven days a week – under a single command: Lieutenant Colonel David Oliva, scourge of drug traffickers.
There was a change of mentality. The fight focused on striking blows against the leaders of the drug trafficking clans, with emphasis on money laundering. The greatest police pressure, since 2018, began to bear fruit, causing the movement of drug traffickers to other provinces bordering Cádiz. Few voices doubt the success of the consecutive special security plans in the Campo de Gibraltar. Since August 2018, with 22,207 operations against criminal groups and 19,907 detained or investigated.
But these figures that the department led by Marlaska now highlights are not exclusively from OCON-Sur. The opposition now claims that after the “dismantling of the unit” drug seizures plummeted. A half truth. It is true that in 2022, after a 2021 in which all ceilings were broken, the drugs seized decreased – despite the fact that in nine months of that year OCON-Sur was still operating. It is also true that in 2023, with the end of the Civil Guard unit dissolved, drug seizures within the framework of the plan increased: both hashish and cocaine, which doubled.
Interior defends that the Civil Guard “chose to create a specific group that it later dissolved to integrate into the territorial judicial police units within the scope of the plan's expansion. That is to say, those civil guards on secondment were transferred to a permanent position in the command offices, but without receiving the per diems that they were provided in OCON-Sur. Police sources estimate these supplements at around 18,000 euros more per year. That is the argument that is officially repeated. However, while the group's dissolution was being decided, an internal affairs investigation came to light that ended up sentencing the unit. A topic that bothers the minister greatly.
Former anti-drug chief David Oliva, decorated by Marlaska and now one step away from being prosecuted for corruption, led the unit with great ambition. The same thing that, according to an agent who was under his command, led him to make “massive mistakes.” “Tremendously obsessed” with grabbing headlines, many operations were inflated in terms of detainees who ended up being acquitted. There were times when the Prosecutor's Office had to write down that they had arrested people without any evidence that could support the accusations.
At UDyCO they do not have good memories of their work either. An inspector from the National Police explains that his desire for prominence led him to interfere in investigations of the other force, causing “continuous clashes.”
Oliva, now dedicated to paperwork in Valdemoro (Madrid), defends that the entire case in which he is involved was a setup: national police falsified reports to put an end to him, he maintains. Something that the judge who proposes to try him for revealing secrets and bribery does not share. And the evidence suggests that Oliva allegedly offered an internal affairs agent a position in his group – with more pay and closer to his family – in exchange for informing him if he was being investigated internally for his alleged proximity to the narcos And that was what ended up giving the finishing touch to the unit.
