Barbate has always been different, explain the old people of the town. In a corner of the cafe’s bar, a young man who is no more than 30 years old and prefers not to say his name, changes the latte in which he daily soaks the toast with salted butter La Imperial for a juice of orange “I need vitamins”, he says. Wear work clothes. On the ankle of one leg, hidden under his pants, is a telematic bracelet that allows him to serve a three-year sentence for drug trafficking outside of prison. “I don’t want to know anything about drugs. Not anymore. I almost killed my mother with grief,” he says.
In 2020 he agreed to pilot a narco-boat. He didn’t have to get rich. 4,000 euros, he assures. It doesn’t seem like much, considering the numbers that work in the area, but it doesn’t look like it’s lying, or that it needs it. The first trip went well. In the second he was arrested. He spent a year and a half in pre-trial detention and there is not a day that he does not regret it. “Who wants, works. You pay less, but you live peacefully.”
Barbate is a humble fishing village with a couple of heart-shaped benches where visitors are photographed looking for the best wild tuna in the almadrava and magnificent beaches. In the cafeteria of the lighthouse, toasts generously smeared with colored butter brighten up the workers’ lunch. It’s rush hour, there are no free tables and there is a shared cry for the tragedy at the port when a narco-boat with six individuals from La Línea de la Concepción killed two civil guards they sent in a zodiac to scare dangerous criminals. That the killers were not from the village is constantly remembered by the people of Barbate, who still do not know where to hide because of the shame they felt when they saw how their neighbors, men and women in tracksuits, leeks and baguettes, cheered. that they had nothing better to do that night of storm and carnival than to go to the pier to defeat some narcos.
It has been a long time since Barbate ceased to be a hot spot in the drug-trafficking network in Camp de Gibraltar. The Línea de la Concepción and, especially, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, concentrate much of the drug activity. Much of the cocaine that is snorted in Europe enters through the port of Algeciras, and represents the third point of the triangle, even though police and judicial pressure has managed to loosen a territory where criminals have managed to extend their tentacles by buying wills in all estates.
It is increasingly difficult to draw on the map the routes along which the boats circulate, in short, the entire coast of the province of Cádiz is good when there is no sea and you can navigate and unload. The narco enables dykes and hiding places where he can, with particular incidence in recent times on the banks of the Guadalquivir, entering through Sanlúcar, next to Doñana, between the natural paths drawn by the rice paddies. Not long ago there was a shootout with the National Police in a random check in which the narcos opened fire with Kalashnikov submachine guns.
Every cartel has its moment. Four days ago in Algeciras, Abdel·lah el-Haj, the Messi of hashish, boasted surrounded by acolytes at parties organized at his place, the Shisha Bar in Getares. The legend of the Castañas, hidden in the reserve, still resonates.
Very close to the Civil Guard barracks, where the zodiac in which Miguel Ángel González and David Pérez were killed is kept, is the neighborhood of El Pinar. Like that of La Cruz de Mayo in Sanlúcar, La Atunara and El Junquillo, in La Línea, or El Saldillo, in Algeciras, the trail and consequences of the drug are visible. Gloomy spaces, occupied housing, poverty and garbage accumulated in ghettos through which street-market tracksuit-wearing drug addicts and drug addicts parade in search of their dose of rebujito, an explosive mixture of cocaine with whatever they put down. Portal number 9 is sadly famous in the neighborhood, a decrepit block that has been the scene of countless raids. Neighborhoods that feed drug dealers with cheap and desperate labor.
“In the 1980s 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 Camp de Gibraltar. These days he remembers that in 2018 he went to the Congressional Interior Committee and warned the deputies of what he now says is the media spotlight shining on his land. Drug trafficking is like energy, he says, it is neither created nor destroyed, it transforms and moves.
Not only 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, Customs Surveillance and the municipal police. At the beginning of the month, the Magistrate Court 1 of Barbate will welcome its new head, Ángel Rojas Navarro. Barbate will be his first destination and the instruction of the double murder of the civil guards, his first case. Her predecessor, the judge who sent the six arrested to prison, was acting as a substitute after the previous one did not last more than a year in office.
Collapsed courts, overworked magistrates and prosecutors, and cases that, as Paco Mena recalls, are shelved or do not go to trial after increasingly frequent compliance agreements. One of the last investigations into drug trafficking in Barbate lasted twelve years and was shelved at the end of last year. A reality that does nothing but increase the impunity that allows the narcotics and their lieutenants to anchor their illegal boats on the high seas or in the docks of ports during storms, waiting for the moment when they have to speed up to attend to an unloading.
Aside from the confiscation statistics that the Ministry of the Interior is quick to display these days as an argument that things are going well, no one in Camp de Gibraltar denies that the dissolution of OCON-Sud October 2022 served as an incentive for the narco. 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 narcotics. That special device against drug trafficking in the Straits had 150 civil guards specialized in follow-ups, gathering sources, money-laundering investigations, drug-trafficking and they knew the area perfectly. Without timetables, with high diets, threatened by powerful traffickers and their families, OCON-South led some of the most successful investigations in recent years in Camp de Gibraltar and managed, for the first time, to make criminals feel fear . At the head of the unit was Lieutenant Colonel David Oliva. Controversial, admired and loathed, but it is not true that in equal parts. Barbate is remembered a lot, especially by the good guys, and some bad guys too.
We have to go back 20 years, to March 2004, when David Oliva was a young officer who already stood out for being ambitious and tenacious. That civil guard devised and led the Mirall operation that put an end to what the people of Barbate nicknamed the Barbate Vice. That investigation managed to dismantle the Antón clan.
They did not limit themselves to confiscating the hashish, but managed to follow the trail of the drug’s black money and accused the suspects of money laundering. Dozens of local businesses, shops and bars collaborated with the money laundering system designed by Antón, . The eldest son of that narco, who started like many others with tobacco smuggling, used to walk around town with a lion cub tied around his neck with a gold chain and enter the shops of the humblest neighborhoods leaving go bundles of bills, and people got excited.
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 has just finished the instruction of a Parla court for bribery and disclosure of secrets. The investigation is not related to the activities of the OCON-South, but to find out if a lieutenant, then assigned to Internal Affairs, “allegedly stole at the instance” of David Oliva confidential information about a case that could affect him.
Numerous portraits of Barbate and the area have been published these days. Few of which like the brilliantly written ones 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 children in high schools wanted to be bushmen . The same boys who on stormy days run to the beaches to fish for the bundles that are lost from the boats due to the storm.
A lot has changed in Barbate. When Oliva and his men dismantled the Antón clan, little Rafael went to the Civil Guard barracks to throw stones. The grandfather scolded him: “Child, what the hell are you doing? stop now! That these gentlemen are just doing their job”.
