The historical Galician drug clans have found in the manufacture of narco-boats dedicated to hashish trafficking and the irregular transportation of people a profitable way to diversify their business. The security forces and bodies have detected how the border with Portugal is becoming the factory for these high-speed boats that are subsequently transferred to the Strait of Gibraltar area.
Galician criminal organizations guarantee “the reliability” of the drug boats and “the competence” of their pilots acquired in navigating the estuaries between rafts, according to police sources. Each drug boat customized to the traffickers' taste is around half a million euros.
The last major police blow to this reinvention of the Galician clans has been dealt by the Civil Guard and the customs surveillance service during the Vozka operation, in which eight vessels have been seized. Not all of them in the manufacturing phase; some in full navigation with bundles of hashish or migrants on board. 25 large displacement engines, nautical equipment, GPS radars and antennas have also been intervened. The agents have been able to verify that several of the vessels manufactured by the dismantled organization are linked to seizures of more than 4,000 kilos of hashish coming from the Moroccan coast.
The modus operandi begins with the creation of shell companies – always in the name of front men – that are used for the acquisition of nautical equipment. A financial network that makes it difficult for investigators to follow the trail of money from illicit activities, mainly drug trafficking. The materials, according to the organic judicial police unit of the Ourense Civil Guard headquarters, come from the international market destined for the north of Portugal. That territory is where the clans find the best refuge to manufacture drug boats, since, unlike in Spain, they are legal there.
A 2018 decree from the Government of Pedro Sánchez allows these vessels to be seized even if they do not carry drugs. For three years, the drug boats seized from traffickers were used by the National Police and Civil Guard in the fight against drug trafficking, but since November 2021, the immediate cessation of use was ordered due to a complaint about the dangerousness of these vessels. A constant complaint from police unions is the inferior conditions with which they face increasingly aggressive mafias. It was precisely one of these drug boats that took the lives of two civil guards in Barbate last February.
The criminal organizations that operate on the border have drawn on mechanics highly specialized in nautical knowledge, in addition to the transporters who move the drug boats to the exact point demanded by traffickers in the Strait. Their transportation, according to the same sources, can be by sea or land, camouflaged in large vehicles. But first comes the a la carte service, which can range from the simple supply of outboard motors or the entire drug boat.
The manufacturing price ranges over 100,000 euros, but they are then sold for five times more. These are, as detailed by the armed institute, boats more than 12 meters in length with engines of 300 horsepower each. This means that they can reach 100 kilometers per hour, with a load capacity of up to three tons. For practical purposes: they cross the Strait in less than 15 minutes. Record time that can hardly be surpassed by the means available to the police.
After the recent dismantling of one of the drug trafficking subsidiaries dedicated to this business – which resulted in six arrests in Ourense, Pontevedra and Valença do Miño (Portugal) – investigators are trying to find out which drug traffickers were among their client portfolio. . Serious indications suggest that two of them would be El Bola, who was a faithful collaborator of Los Castañas and Messi del Hachís, and El Piraña. But they are convinced that the list is much longer.
