Barbate was always different, say the old people of the place. In a corner of the cafeteria counter, a young man, who is no more than 30 years old and prefers not to share his name, changes the coffee with milk in which he dips the toast with La Imperial salted butter every day for an orange juice . “I need vitamins,” he says. He wears work attire. On the ankle of one of his legs, a telematic bracelet is hidden under his pants that allows him to serve a three-year sentence for drug trafficking outside of prison. “I don’t want to know anything about drugs. Never more. “I almost killed my mother from grief,” he says.
In 2020 he agreed to pilot a drug boat. He wasn’t going to get rich. 4,000 euros, he says. It doesn’t seem like much for the figures in the area, but he doesn’t look like he has the need to lie. The first trip went well. The second was arrested. He spent a year and a half in preventive detention and there is not a day that he does not regret. “Whoever wants, works. You earn less, but you live in peace.”
Barbate is a humble fishing village with a couple of heart-shaped benches where visitors looking for the best wild tuna in the almadraba and magnificent beaches take photographs. In the lighthouse cafeteria, toast generously spread with red butter brightens the workers’ lunch. It’s rush hour, there are no free tables and the shared lament sounds for the tragedy in the port when a drug boat with six individuals from La Línea de la Concepción killed two civil guards who were sent in a zodiac to scare away some dangerous criminals. That the murderers were not from the town is remembered all the time by the people of Barbate, who still do not know where to hide their heads because of the shame they felt when they heard how their neighbors cheered, men and women in tracksuits, a joint and a bag, who had nothing better. What to do that night of storm and carnival than to go to the boardwalk to cheer for some drug traffickers.
It has been a long time since Barbate stopped being a hot spot in the drug trafficking network in Campo de Gibraltar. La Línea de la Concepción and, especially, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, concentrate a good part of the drug traffickers’ activity. Algeciras, with the port through which a good part of the cocaine snorted in Europe enters, is the third point of the triangle, although police and judicial pressure has managed to relax an enclave in which criminals have managed to spread their tentacles by buying wills. in all classes.
It is increasingly difficult to draw on the map the routes along which the gliders parade; in short, the entire coastline of the province of Cádiz is good when there is no storm surge and you can navigate and unload. The drug trafficker establishes dams and nurseries where it can, with special incidence in recent times on the banks of the Guadalquivir, entering through Sanlúcar, next to Doñana, between the natural paths drawn by the rice fields. Not long ago there was a shooting confrontation with the National Police in a random control in which the drug traffickers opened fire with Kalasnikov submachine guns.
Every cartel has its moment. Four days ago, in Algeciras, Abdellah el Haj, the Messi of hashish, strutted around surrounded by acolytes at parties organized at his place, the Shisha Bar in Getares. The legend of the Castaña, hidden in the reserve, still resonates.
Very close to the Civil Guard barracks house, where the zodiac in which Miguel Ángel González and David Pérez were murdered is guarded, stands the neighborhood of El Pinar. Like La Cruz de Mayo in Sanlúcar, La Atunara and El Junquillo, in La Línea, or El Saldillo, in Algeciras, the trail and consequences of drugs are visible. Dreary spaces, occupied homes, poverty and garbage accumulated in ghettos through which emaciated and toothless drug addicts in flea market tracksuits parade in search of their dose of rebujito, an explosive mixture of cocaine with anything they put on it. In the neighborhood, portal number 9 is infamous, a decrepit block that has been the scene of countless raids. Neighborhoods that provide cheap and desperate labor to drug traffickers.
“In the eighties we took to the streets demanding that drugs be put under siege,” recalls Paco Mena, one of the most dignified and respected voices, tireless agitator of consciences and president of the Anti-Drug Associations in the Campo de Gibraltar. These days he remembers that in 2018 he went to the Congressional Interior Commission and warned the deputies of the same thing that he says now that the media spotlight illuminates his land. Drug trafficking is like energy, he says, it is neither created nor destroyed, it is transformed and displaced.
Not just Mena. There are judges and prosecutors who these days have bravely denounced a precariousness of means that not only affects the Civil Guard, the National Police, the Customs Surveillance and the municipal police. At the beginning of the month, the investigating court number 1 of Barbate will welcome its new owner, Ángel Rojas Navarro. Barbate will be his first destination and the investigation of the double murder of the civil guards, his first case. His predecessor, the judge who sent the six detainees to prison, was a replacement after the previous one could not last more than a year in the position.
Collapsed courts, overwhelmed magistrates and prosecutors, and cases that, as Paco Mena recalls, are archived or do not reach trial after increasingly frequent conformity agreements. One of the last investigations into drug trafficking in Barbate lasted twelve years and was archived at the end of last year. A reality that only increases the impunity that allows drug traffickers and their lieutenants to anchor their illegal gliders on the high seas or in the docks of ports during stormy weather, pending the moment when they have to provide gas to attend to an unloading. .
Aside from the seizure statistics that the Ministry of the Interior is quick to present these days as an argument that things are being done well, no one in Campo de Gibraltar denies that the dissolution of OCON-Sur in October 2022 served as an incentive. to the drug dealer The main bosses threatened by the elite group of the Civil Guard interpreted the disintegration of the unit as a particular triumph in the unequal war against drugs. This special device against drug trafficking in the Strait had 150 civil guards specialized in monitoring, recruiting sources, investigations into money laundering, drug trafficking and they knew the area perfectly. Without schedules, with high diets, threatened by powerful traffickers and themselves and their families, OCON-Sur led some of the most successful investigations in recent years in the Campo de Gibraltar and managed, for the first time, to make criminals feel afraid. Leading the unit was Lieutenant Colonel David Oliva. Controversial, admired and detested, but it is not true that in equal parts. In Barbate they remember him a lot, especially the good ones and some bad ones too.
We must travel back 20 years, to March 2020, when David Oliva was a young officer who already stood out for his ambition and tenacity. That civil guard devised and led Operation Espejo, which ended what the people of Barbate jokingly called the Barbate Vice. That investigation managed to dismantle the Antón clan.
They did not limit themselves to seizing the hashish, but managed to follow the trail of black drug money, accusing the suspects of laundering. Dozens of businesses, establishments and bars in the town collaborated with the money laundering system designed by Antón. The eldest son of that drug trafficker, who began like many with tobacco smuggling, walked around the town with a baby lion tied around his neck with a gold chain and entered the stores in the humblest neighborhoods releasing wads of bills. to the enthusiasm of the people.
It is the same David Oliva who years later, with an impeccable service record and decorated by Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, is immersed in an investigation that a Parla court has just completed its investigation for bribery and revelation of secrets. The investigation is not related to the activities of OCON-Sur, but rather finds out whether a lieutenant, then assigned to Internal Affairs, “allegedly stole at the behest of” David Oliva confidential information about a case that could affect him.
These days numerous portraits of Barbate and the area have been published. Few like those brilliantly written by journalists Juan José Téllez and Pedro Ingelmo, one from Cádiz and the other from Mérida but adopted in the area, who remembered how not so long ago school children when they grew up wanted to be bushmen. The kids who run to the beaches on stormy days to fish for the bales that are lost from the gliders due to the storm.
Many things have changed in Barbate. When Oliva and his men dismantled the Antón clan, little Rafael went to the Civil Guard headquarters to throw stones. The grandfather reproached him: “Child, what the hell are you doing. For now! “That these gentlemen are just doing their job.”
