The death of two civil guards after being attacked by a narco-boat in the port of Barbate has served the opposition as an element of political shock, the dissolution of OCON-Sud, the unit of the Civil Guard to fight against drug trafficking in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Popular Party and Vox, which are embraced by the associations of the armed institute, are preparing a parliamentary offensive against the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, whom they accuse of dismantling without explanation a wrongly called “unit of elite”. However, behind the end of this special device – which went almost unnoticed after the summer of 2022 – lights and shadows were mixed that now no one wants to remember: a personalist leader who ended up being prosecuted for corruption, a buried war with the National Police or inflated operations to grab headlines.
The idea of ??the Anti-Narcotics Coordination Organization arose during the term of Juan Ignacio Zoido in the Interior, but it did not materialize because the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy stopped it. The then newly-arrived magistrate of the National Court in the Interior made it a priority to restore the principle of authority in the south of Spain by providing millions in the fight against drug-trafficking.
Each police force with its own strategy. The National Police harassed the traffickers, also with many successes, through the Drug and Organized Crime Unit (UDyCO), and the Civil Guard devised a temporary structure in which its agents would serve on duty – available 24 hours a day hours of the seven days of the week – under a single command: lieutenant colonel David Oliva, scourge of narcos.
There was a change in mentality. The fight focused on striking the tops of the drug-trafficking clans, with an emphasis on money laundering. A higher police pressure, since that 2018, which began to bear fruit and caused the displacement of drug trafficking to other provinces bordering Cádiz. Few voices doubt the success of the consecutive special security plans at Camp de Gibraltar. Since August 2018 with 22,207 operations against criminal groups and 19,907 arrested or investigated.
But these figures, now highlighted by the department headed by Marlaska, are not exclusively from OCON-Sud. The opposition now claims that after the “dismantling of the unit” drug seizures fell. A half truth. It is true that in 2022, after a 2021 in which all records were broken, the amount of confiscated drugs decreased – despite the fact that OCON-Sud continued to operate for nine months of that year. It is also true that in 2023, with the Civil Guard unit already disbanded, drug seizures within the framework of the plan increased: both those of hashish and those of cocaine, which doubled.
Interior defends that the Civil Guard “chose to create a specific group which it later disbanded to integrate the territorial judicial police units in the scope of the expansion of the plan. That is to say, that those civil guards on duty were transferred to a fixed position in the commands, but without receiving the per diems provided to them in OCON-Sud. Police sources estimate those supplements at around 18,000 euros more per year. This is the argument that is officially repeated. However, while the decision was being made to dissolve the group, an internal affairs investigation appeared that ended up condemning the unit. A subject that greatly bothers the minister.
Former anti-drug chief David Oliva, decorated by Marlaska and now one step away from being prosecuted for corruption, piloted the unit with great ambition. The same one that, according to an agent who was under his command, led him to make “errors like a farmer’s house”. “Extremely obsessed” with grabbing headlines, many operations were inflated in terms of detainees who ended up being acquitted. There was a time when the Prosecutor’s Office had to leave in writing that there were arrests without any evidence that could support the accusations.
At UDyCO, they don’t have good memories of their work either. An inspector from the National Police explains that his desire to be prominent led him to interfere in the investigations of the other body, which caused “continuous clashes”.
Oliva, now dedicated to paperwork in Valdemoro (Madrid), defends that the whole case in which he is involved was a set-up: national police falsified reports to bring him down, he says. Something that is not shared by the judge who proposes to try him for disclosure of secrets and bribery. And the evidence points to Oliva allegedly offering an internal affairs agent a position in his group – higher pay and closer to his family – in exchange for him to inform him if he was being investigated internally by their alleged proximity to drug traffickers. And that was what ended up giving the unit the coup de grace.
