Beneath the provincial geography, the coast of Andalusia hides the (secret) shape of a Greek cross. It is enough to contemplate an old map, one of those venerable engravings made by the artisans who began to work with the printing press, to understand the reason why in southern Spain - and specifically in the space that extends on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, both towards the East and towards the West – the drug routes heading towards Northern Europe have converged for years: Antwerp, Rotterdam or Hamburg.
Tarifa is the figurative foot of this real and imaginary cross. Sanlúcar, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir that separates Cádiz from Huelva, is the western arm of the blade; The Costa del Sol functions as its eastern extension. The head of the cross would be located in the area of influence located around Seville, the terminal station of the old American galleons.
After maps come words. Every culture begins with the creation of a dictionary. Smugglers from the South have used their own lexicon for decades: rubbers (speed boats), vuelcos (robberies between gangs), bulgos (bales of hashish), alijar (transporting drugs), bushmen (the porters who collect the cost on the beaches), nurseries (warehouses), latas (small boats that collect bales of drugs thrown on the high seas) or points (paid lookouts who control police movements from motorcycles).
The drug landscape alters the land with the lake domains: it runs between the marshes where rice is grown to the Miami of Malaga, crossing inland regions such as La Janda, where Barbate is located. In this parallelogram, the heart of Baja Andalusia, illegal goods circulate that enrich local smuggling clans. First it was tobacco. Then, the hashish. Increasingly, there are cocaine and shadow crews of immigrants who – in desperation – put themselves in the hands of the mafias that operate on both sides of the Strait to cover the journey (often deadly) between Morocco and Europe.
Nothing new under the ancestral sun of the South, which has seen all the civilizations of Western history arrive and collapse. Just over six years ago, a group of twenty hooded men attacked a hospital in La Línea (Cádiz) with rifles and pistols to rescue a detained drug trafficker. Magical realism? Absolutely. Business. The drug postmen, many of them seasoned in trades and maritime tasks, do their job; The Civil Guard complies (as it can and when it can) with its duty. Both parties have been fighting a war of resistance for decades where battles and duels – naval – are altered with armistices.
Artisanal fishing, the only traditional industry, began to run out in Cádiz more than forty years ago. Since then, chocolate has replaced fish shipments. The economy of necessity prevailed over seafaring culture. What emerged from this change is a different business, on a different scale, which first allowed the material survival of many people – at the cost of breaking the law – but later evolved until it became a mechanical device capable of making a lot of money in a very easy. Load, purr, download. And get paid.
The illegal trade routes in Andalusia la Baja, by necessity, had to dislocate its fragile social ecosystem, punished by decades of scarcity and austerity. Whoever has money wants to show it. And whoever pays (in Cádiz and elsewhere) wants to rule. The problem is that the drug also began to claim victims in many towns on the coast. There arose social opposition – which is the majority feeling – against the drug clans, one of the stigmas of Campo de Gibraltar, periphery of the periphery. A border territory.
It would not take long for the business to become more sophisticated: illegal trafficking grew and its social base – which was originally only family-based – expanded. In one of the poorest geographical areas of Andalusia, money – of course always in cash – circulated without control. The wads of bills were passed from hand to hand. There were people who earned fortunes without effort. Others, however, suffered. Money laundering and corruption, including police and even judicial corruption.
Nothing is more difficult to combat in this life than easy profit. Hence the (moral) stain of smuggling has long contaminated the coastline that goes from the Andalusia of the marshes to the Costa del Sol, including the tax haven of Gibraltar. La Línea, Conil, Barbate, Bonanza, Chiclana, Sanlúcar, Estepona. Even Axarquía. Glider entry and exit ports. Opposite, the immense beaches that run from Ceuta to Tangier. And Morocco, the largest hashish factory and the last balcony in Africa overlooking Europe.
An extensive network of roads, river highways and secondary roads tabulate the sea and structure this universe where clans of smugglers circulate in broad daylight in high-speed boats loaded with chocolate, just like the one that a few days ago ran over two police officers. the Civil Guard in Barbate. As in the Far West, the rules that govern this territory have nothing to do with the law. Indiscipline and denunciation pay. Risk is charged and collaboration is rewarded. Doubting means being excluded from the family tribe.
Many may not remember it, but at the end of the nineties, in this same enclave, the political party of the builder Jesús Gil tried to found an empire. He presented candidacies for nine mayoralties on the coast of Málaga and Cádiz. He governed Ceuta, Barbate, San Roque, La Línea, Estepona and Manilva and obtained councilors – almost a hundred – in all the constituencies, without abandoning Marbella, the Jerusalem of his network of financial and real estate interests.
What was Gil looking for with control of this territory? Without a doubt, the combined benefits between the illegal trade of goods, the laundering of the resulting profits, real estate speculation and the immense capital gains left by an activity where the pilot of a boat is not paid less than 30,000 euros per trip, a cache collected On the beach it is charged at a rate of 2,000 or 3,000 euros and any herald between a boat and a daycare center will not leave their home for less than 15,000 euros. Just like in gold rush America.
The Strait has been, since then, a taifa that extends across the eleven (few) nautical miles that separate Andalusia from Morocco. The various drug trafficking sagas have been operating there for forty years, for whom dissimulation and discretion have ceased to be habits, firearms have become their tools and contacts with other international networks – from Colombia to the South of Italy – are another element of their business, which has become more technical.
All smugglers know the schedules and shifts of the Civil Guard, they communicate through private encrypted messaging networks and use marine radars and aquatic drones, some manufactured in Castellar de la Frontera by a family, for their freight. The difference between the current drug lords with respect to the pioneers of smuggling in the South is that with the latter - and there is unanimity on this - they could negotiate and, while still being dangerous, they did not enjoy exercising violence, which was always It was a sudden accident.
Their heirs, on the other hand, do not understand old laws: they earn fortunes every day, they like their wealth to be noticed and they exert their social influence superbly. They know that the courts cannot handle the cases they have open, they have the funds to pay for good law firms, they have enough solvency to get out of jail after paying their bail and they do not mind harassing the Civil Guard, whose material resources and technological are inferior to those of the clans, who also accuse the leaders of the security forces – to deactivate them – of drinking from the black pot of drugs. It is not always false.
The business doesn't stop. It only changes embassies. The Costa del Sol, Valencia and the rest of Levante are the alternative expansion enclaves when the situation becomes complicated in the Strait. Habits are also different: conflicts between competing gangs are no longer resolved by pacts, but by settling accounts and hitmen. Nobody covers up.
Spain does not only have a problem with immigration on its southern border. She has incubated a narco-region. The figures of operations, seizures and arrests do not demonstrate the success of the Government in the fight against drug smuggling. They are evidence of its failure and a disturbing sign of the immense magnitude of the problem. To think that the colonization of Andalusia will not have political consequences is pure naivety. When a civil guard is harassed or murdered while the perpetrators of his death are cheered from a safe harbor, as has happened in Barbate, society has returned to the times of the Roman circus.
