José Ramón Barral, known as Baby, who was mayor of Ribadumia (Pontevedra) between 1983 and 2001, died this Thursday at the age of 79. Barral had been under police scrutiny since the 1980s. Barral chained four absolute majorities in his town of 5,000 inhabitants, but he was also one of the most investigated alleged smugglers in Galicia and the one who has managed to avoid harassment from the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA) for the longest time. Barral was one of the most influential councilors in Galicia and had managed to employ more than a hundred of his loyal voters in the Provincial Council of Pontevedra, then governed by his party, first Alianza Popular and then the PP. The councilor always denied the charges that truncated his fourth absolute majority and for which he had to resign 22 years ago. He had an open case in the Provincial Court of Pontevedra for smuggling and another in the National Court, derived from the so-called Operation Zebra, for money laundering and smuggling. He had been suffering from health problems for a long time, which his defense used to justify his not appearing at the court sessions.
The investigations against Barral for smuggling became one of the oldest cases in Spain. Last year he launched a trial in Pontevedra, 15 years late in the case being tried and which has subsequently suffered several suspensions, among them due to the delicate health of the former PP councilor. The investigation began with 43 defendants and the number was reduced to 12—after four deaths, to which Barral’s death is now added—among them a customs officer and a civil guard. The matter started with a stash of drugs that could never be proven. The rogatory commissions sent to Switzerland, where it was hoped to find a part of the former mayor’s hidden fortune, completely failed and delayed the process for years. Last February, the Pontevedra Courtroom declared invalid the telephone taps that recorded the conversations that Barral had had in the mayor’s office. The judicial decision dismantled the accusation that the councilor gave instructions to his lackeys from his office and that he controlled both the alleged tobacco landings and the payment to his uniformed spies, those who allegedly informed him of the movements of the planes and ships of Customs to avoid surprise boardings.
The Prosecutor’s Office attributed to Barral the operation of two fishing vessels and a merchant ship that introduced tobacco that arrived in containers to Europe. The prosecutor maintains that in 1997 he already introduced 1.17 million packs from Senegal, with a value of 2.2 million euros, and that he had connections in the United States and the Persian Gulf to ship shipments. The public ministry described Barral’s double life dotted with intrigues, betrayals and leaks, all of them reflected in an investigation that began in 1996, a year after his mentor, businessman Vicente Otero, died. Terito, considered the father of Galician smuggling and also a prominent member of PP. Barral supposedly gave orders from his mayoral phone and received leaks from the same headquarters of the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA) in A Coruña in exchange for succulent amounts of money. The information that these officials allegedly provided to the former mayor to guarantee the transfer of the caches to Galicia even led to the suspension of two operations scheduled by the organization in the months of February and October 1999, the accusation maintains. The public ministry maintains that Barral was dealing with an extensive organization made up of Portuguese, Dutch, Croatian, Swiss, British, Polish and Greek citizens, in addition to the connections that the network had in North America and the Sultanate of Oman for the shipment and transit of the stashes.
Barral was arrested in his chalet in Ribadumia on the morning of May 14, 2001 by Customs agents who had been monitoring his movements since the 1980s. Almost at the same time, his brother Feliciano, then president of the local executive of the PP, was also arrested. The fall of the Barral brothers shook the foundations of the party in which they had militated under the acronym AP. Barral had to resign, convinced that he had been betrayed from La Moncloa, where his countryman Mariano Rajoy held the first vice presidency of the Aznar Government.
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