On February 5, the Mossos d’Esquadra intercepted a drug landing in the port of Mataró. Two narco-boats entered the dock fully loaded. A total of three arrived, but the ones that approached were only two, to avoid risks. A group of thirty people were waiting on the ground ready to unload. A port security guard alerted the Mossos when he noticed the maneuver. The Pequín case, that is how the operation was named due to the proximity of the port to Pequín de Mataró beach, ended with the intervention of 154 bundles of hashish weighing five and a half tons and the arrest of 26 people in two operations, the last carried out in September. The value of the drug on the black market rises to 11.5 million euros. The organization had bribed with 15,000 euros one of the port guards who allowed the porters to enter.
In the last year, the Mossos have detected thirteen landings of this style on the Catalan coast, twice as many as the previous year, in which six were recorded. Catalonia had noticed at the beginning of the two thousand how the coast was a chosen place to unload hashish. This practice, however, decreased in 2010 and the organizations dedicated to drug trafficking chose to transport the goods by road. However, from 2018 everything changed. Police pressure in the Straits and in the countryside of Gibraltar pushed drug traffickers to look for new places. Catalonia is not the Galicia of the eighties that Fariña describes, but the Catalan coast has already become a gateway for hashish and a very important strategic step to distribute the drug to the rest of Europe.
Since the beginning of the year, the Catalan police have dismantled 15 criminal organizations, when the previous year there were 10, and 5 in 2021. In addition, 38 new investigations into hashish trafficking have been opened, arrests have been made 912 people and 11.6 tons have been involved. In total, since 2018, the Mossos have confiscated 40 tons of hashish. The trend is on the rise and the Catalan police have deployed a plan to stop the phenomenon with the aim of dismantling these organizations that have international ramifications through the coordination of Europol and Eurojust, or to get them off the Catalan coast through the preventive patrolling of the maritime police unit, which has just been created, and the implementation of a scanner at the controls, similar to the one at the ports, to detect the load of trucks traveling on the roads.
Regarding marijuana, Catalonia is a country where the drug is produced, and this leads to situations of violence and narco-assaults between rival gangs, in the case of hashish, on the other hand, the inherent violence is less, although it has also experienced an increase. Last year there were seven incidents, while this year there have been thirteen. Firearms were used in half. “Unlike marijuana, we have not detected associated phenomena such as corruption or the infiltration of legal companies”, remarked yesterday Antoni Salleras, chief inspector of the central area of ??organized crime of the criminal investigation division of the Mossos .
Until now, the most common way was to do it by road and specifically by the AP-7, in high-end cars or hidden in the load of the truck. However, the Mossos have found workshops where they transform boats into narco-launches, such as in Castelló d’Empúries, where an industrial ship destined for this activity was discovered.
The narco boats travel directly from Morocco to the Catalan coast without stopping to refuel. They use alternative routes, traveling at low speed to avoid the wake they leave in the sea betraying them to police helicopters.
