The tragic death of two civil guards in the bay of Barbate (Cádiz) has unleashed political anger on the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who is being asked to resign for having left the security forces fighting against the drug traffickers, who operate with impunity in Cadiz waters.
The problem is not only whether the Minister of the Interior needs to be relieved, but what is the real penetration of the drug cartels who are running in their air in the south of Spain, confronting the police, establishing complicity with the local population and threatening coexistence. In the long run, also political stability.
Experience has shown in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and practically all the rest of Latin America that everything started with small skirmishes between the narcos and the police until it became a problem of Serious situation, from which many of the countries involved have not yet recovered.
Violence and death accompany the world of drug trafficking. Money, weapons and political distortion are their ways of acting. A parallel power confronts the institutions, which are unable to combat those who defy the law by imposing their criminal rules and regulations wherever they go.
The images of the drug boat passing over the defense vessel and killing two civil guards give the impression that neither Grande-Marlaska nor this Government nor the previous ones have taken the fight against drug trafficking seriously. The Primer Comando de la Capital, a cartel born in Brazil in the nineties and which has 40,000 members worldwide, operates throughout America and also in Europe. There are more cartels that dominate a vast global organized crime network.
Much of the merchandise is consumed in the United States and Europe, where cocaine and hard drugs are traded, even at the cost of harming the personal health of hundreds of thousands of people. It is a market of death that affects consumers, but especially those who are victims of extortions and deaths perpetrated by criminal cartels. Either the drug kingpins on our shores are stopped legally and by the police or we will have very serious problems. And this is the exclusive responsibility of the central and regional governments.
