The spectacular operation took place during the months of November, December and January 1993. More than a hundred civil guards were activated every Thursday until Monday to establish dozens of rigorous traffic controls on the El Saler highway (CV-500). of the one known as Ruta del Bakalao or Ruta Destroy, from València to Cullera, which included nightclubs such as Barraca, Chocolate, Puzzle or Spook. Controls that, as La Vanguardia described live, penetrated the parking lots of the nightclubs, and included the work of trained dogs, meticulous searches and even helicopters.
Therefore, 30 years have passed since what Vicente Pizcueta, a good connoisseur of the Route and expert in nightlife, calls “the decline” of a social and cultural phenomenon unique in Europe. Harsh police pressure conditioned and motivated, in part, by the climate of public opinion generated by the news coverage of national television. Joan Oleaque, professor and author of the book “En Éxtasis” (Barlin), recognizes that that police pressure caused “going out to party to become a delirium, typical of a nightmare, which, along with a grotesque trivialization of the environment and the music on that circuit, ended up burying what for years became the most advanced and hypnotic of Spanish entertainment.
Why was this police operation activated at that time against a mode of leisure that had been operating for more than a decade? Oleaque responds that “the focus began to come from a report published in the DGT magazine Tráfico called “Las espinas del bakalao”, which spoke of a path of wild nightclubs between Madrid and Valencia, in a kind of “mega- abysmal route.” Rafael Vera, Secretary of State for Security, “in the midst of the media and chemical excess” he emphasizes, ordered the Police to apply the Corcuera law (or law of kicking the door) on the influx to the nightclubs that make up what was called the Bakalao Route.
Previously, in the summer of 1993, national television stations paid special attention to the phenomenon, with a multitude of sensational reports highlighting traffic accidents, drug consumption and what was known on the road as “the gap.” . Months before, these same television stations had successfully tested a new formula to turn human tragedy into a spectacle to capture massive audiences: the crime of the Alcàsser girls. “With the media attention of the summer of ’93, everything went crazy: instead of scaring people away, the partying masses from all over Spain wanted to try what appeared in the images, and tens of thousands arrived in torrents every week from Catalonia, Madrid, Andalusia , from wherever they were. They were holiday tourists, to understand us, squeezing themselves to the end,” explains Oleaque.
It all started in mid-November 1993. Hundreds of civil guards were activated to almost individually control those who attended the discos on the Ruta del Bakalao. “The controls were by land and air, helicopters became common in flying over the El Saler highway and the parking lots, and the controls by the security forces were tremendous, martial, typical of anti-terrorism: full searches sun with dogs on cars, body searches with L’Albufera in the background, firearms more typical of the persecution of big drug traffickers,” Oleaque recalls. “The police pressure was excessive, many red lines were crossed in the way they persecuted and harassed people,” says Pizcueta.
Suso Boix, now a “boomer” from Alzira by profession, and who even helped to “play” at the Isla nightclub in the early 90s, comments that “that took away the desire to go to Barraca or Chocolate, from Algemesí It was already full of controls, they stopped you and searched you thoroughly, they even made you lower your pants, and there were fines of five hundred or more pesetas; in the end you changed that by going to Valencia where no one controlled you. “There were partygoers who, when they saw the checkpoints in the distance, consumed all the drugs they were carrying at once so that they would not detect it, causing a scene,” adds Oleaque.
Pizcueta remembers that, “we even carried out a campaign with Amnesty International because we were convinced that individual rights were being violated.” This specialist comments that “the pressure that existed here did not exist in Madrid, Barcelona or the Basque Country, where their leisure routes were also as outdated or more out of date than those in Valencia.” And he adds that “okay, it’s true that there was a lot of drug movement here, but nothing different from other places.” He concludes that “that was a crossfire between the media and the Ministry of the Interior that ended up dealing a mortal blow to the Route when the data confirmed that the alarm here was disproportionate, in the end there were hardly any sanctions for drugs or for violating safety regulations.” traffic”.
Is right. This newspaper witnessed on several nights how only 1% of the hundreds of young people subjected to alcohol tests on the weekend tested positive. Data on deaths on the Route were also disclosed that did not occur on that road, but rather in the connection between Madrid and Valencia or Barcelona and Valencia, but which were pointed out as caused by the Valencian phenomenon. All this information, plus the images of “high” young people selected by television, ended up conditioning public opinion that applauded the police pressure. From there, in the following months some venues decided to reduce their activity and even close. And the Bakalao Route or Destroy Route began a gradual decline that would eventually make it disappear. It is now 30 years.
