Its successes in the police fight against drug trafficking have become a major logistical problem for the Civil Guard. The armed institute plans to build a large warehouse in Seville where it will guard the drug stashes involved in Andalusia – the main gateway for narcotics in Spain – after verifying that the volume of seizures has in recent years exceeded “the capacity of existing warehouses.” currently” and has been forced to use spaces not enabled for this with the security risk that this entails, as stated in the file to tender the construction of the new facilities to which EL PAÍS has had access.
The new warehouse will be built on the premises of the Civil Guard Command on Villanueva del Pítamo Avenue in the Andalusian capital. Specifically, where “the scrapping vehicles” of the mobile detachment now accumulate. It is planned to have a 530 square meter plant (of which at least 324 will be occupied with drug shelves) and the capacity to store “about 50 tons” of different drugs, mainly cocaine, hashish and marijuana. In 2023, the Civil Guard and National Police intervened, within the Special Security Plan for Campo de Gibraltar alone, 239 tons of hashish, 45 of cocaine and 22 of marijuana, according to statistics from the Ministry of the Interior. In the first two months of this year there have already been 18 tons of hashish, six of cocaine and almost three of marijuana.
The project contemplates that, to accelerate its construction, the new facility will be built using “prefabricated” walls that, in addition, allow it to be adapted “to the intended use.” The Civil Guard wants the resulting interior space to enable nine storage areas, each of them intended for arrests made by each of the Andalusian provincial commands. Also that the design takes into account the format in which the narcotic is usually used. Thus, the tender file recalls that cocaine is usually presented “in small kilo packages”; that marijuana “is usually taken in bulk and bagged in bags of different sizes,” and that hashish comes “in burlap bundles [de] 33-35 kilos in weight” which tend to be “those that cause the most storage problems.” The project proposes that the new facility allows the caches to be arranged on pallets to facilitate their storage using industrial machinery. It also contemplates that large-tonnage vehicles can enter the premises to facilitate the unloading of drugs directly inside.
The tender file – which is in its first phase, the drafting of the preliminary project and execution project – recalls that “the risk inherent in the nature of said substances, as well as the dangerous situations generated by their storage and custody” requires that the warehouse has “adequate security and surveillance measures” to avoid thefts such as the one suffered by a judicial warehouse in Cádiz in 2012, where 290 kilos of cocaine were stolen. Specifically, the documentation cites the need for it to have “passive and active elements, such as anti-intrusion alarm, seismic and volumetric detectors, video surveillance cameras, etc.”, which have been established jointly by the Intelligence Center against the Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO, dependent on the Secretary of State for Security) and the General Staff of Logistics of the Civil Guard.
Since the theft at the Cádiz facilities, measures have been taken to ensure that judges authorize the destruction of the seized drugs as quickly as possible and, in this way, reduce the risk posed by their long-term storage. The armed institute now assures that these deadlines currently mean “a minimum of one month”, which it considers “more time than desired.” However, the State Attorney General’s report for 2022 was less optimistic and raised this period to between a month and a half and three months. In the last report, last year, the public ministry once again focused on the same problem, although without citing deadlines, when talking about the increasing quantities of marijuana seized: “Although the new procedural legislation favors destruction, which is automatic unless express judicial prohibition, it is confirmed that the problems of drug destruction persist and, therefore, the risks of conservation of the substance and the associated costs continue.
In 2022, the last year for which there are public statistics, the Interior destroyed 1,231 tons of drugs by court order, of which just over a third, 474,012 kilos, were burned in large industrial ovens, the vast majority of which was hashish and cocaine. The high quantities of drugs seized each year have led the Ministry of the Interior to seek to expand this destruction capacity. Last year it looked for a new incineration point and, since 2022, it has put out several tenders to hire gardening companies to dismantle the largest marijuana plantations, which have more than 10,000 plants, and which are increasingly numerous, according to police statistics. The last of these contracts was awarded this Monday with a budget of more than 700,000 euros.
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In recent years, the Interior has also opted for the purchase of biomass destruction machines (since 2017 it has acquired fifty) so that they can be handled by the members of the security forces themselves and thus address the problems it caused, both in terms of security and health, the accumulation of these plants in police warehouses until the judge decided on their destruction.
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