A man poses lying on dozens of what look like bales of hashish on board a drug boat. Four semi-rigid boats stacked against each other in the sea, the one in the center full of diesel bottles. Another rubber plows through the water with four crew members sorting out more bales, while in the background a pounding lyric plays: “A kiss, for those who are still imprisoned.” These are some of the dozens of narco-flaunting videos that populate TikTok, the new favorite network of Strait traffickers to proudly display their stashes of hashish. After spending three years in a low profile due to the police siege, there are agents who are concerned about the return to their old ways, just in a few days in which the Guadalquivir and its surroundings have made it clear that this drug is still very present in the area.
“You can't see the big ones, but the lieutenants, those below, are the ones who once again make more ostentation. They have been calm for a while, but the resurgence is like daisies,” summarizes a civil guard from La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz). The agent draws a parallel between what he sees again on the streets of his city and what happens on TikTok, full of videos in which he boasts about stashes and drug boat movements. Just search for the words “rubber” and “Stretch” to locate these recordings, most of them uploaded by anonymous accounts or with presumably false names in recent months.
In the shots, masked crew members appear while sailing through the sea with hashish or flasks of gasoline and display tricks typical of drug traffickers in the area, such as tying the engine covers with straps so that they do not jump at high speeds. Most of the accounts that upload this content are known to the agents, as confirmed by up to two investigators from the Civil Guard and the National Police, without providing more details. Presumably, most of the videos have not even been recorded by them, as a source close to the drug world points out. But the mere dissemination bothers those who have spent years trying to end the feeling of impunity that has established itself among hashish traffickers in the Strait. “The feeling is one of impunity and you say, aren't these people being arrested?”, an armed institute agent asks, disgruntled.
“These are aspiring drug traffickers. “Those experienced in the matter are not ones to do these things,” acknowledges a source close to the traffickers. They agree with the other side. “Those who fool around on social networks are small, fat people don't play with those things. Are little narcos”, explains an investigator from the National Police in Cádiz with sarcasm. In fact, despite the social alarm that these types of publications generate, it is not these videos that most worry or focus the interest of the agents, who are more focused on searching the Internet for the traces that the bosses or those close to them leave about their lives. And that is not so simple, after the names of hashish came out chastened by their cockiness and they themselves gave orders to their own not to go overboard on networks like Facebook or Instagram.
The reggaeton of Isco Tejón, one of the two Castaña brothers, known as the kings of hashish, in the video clip Candle In October 2018, this ban was opened on the networks. His stellar participation surrounded by half-naked girls and bottles of champagne unnerved the security forces who, by then, were already immersed in the Campo de Gibraltar Special Security Plan, launched in the summer of that year. At that time it was common for drug traffickers and their pawns to boast on their social networks—with their names and surnames and open profiles—about dedicating themselves to hashish trafficking and the luxury that it offered them. But such was the audacity that they even suffered the internal betrayal of one of their own, who created an anonymous profile on Instagram and spread love threesomes, cuckoldings and parties. A response that lasted hours and especially hurt the accused drug traffickers.
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After that and the thousands of arrests resulting from the police siege, the traffickers learned and abandoned cockiness, both online and in real life, where they stopped driving around in luxurious cars. More than three years have passed in this silence, until they have dared to show off again. The police link the profiles that spread these stash videos with the reopening of many of the gyms that were sealed in the past, involved in money laundering investigations for drug trafficking. “You can see that they have returned to their old ways: you can see them entering and leaving as before. They, with the Land Rovers, they with a lot of gym,” explains the agent.
More movement in the Guadalquivir
“Drug trafficking has never stopped, whether we detect it more or less is another thing. It seems that there is more ostentation again, but the principle of authority has been recovered and I believe it has not been lost,” says a police officer in the area. His colleague from the National Police of Cádiz believes that, for now, there have been no major changes and links cockiness to times of the year, such as summer, “when they party all day.” But the TikTok videos join other indicators that suggest that, after a period of apparent calm, business is moving again, in areas such as the Guadalquivir and its surroundings. On the 17th, the civil guards of a patrol boat watched as up to four empty drug boats passed them at high speed in the river to enter the sea. That same night, another patrol boat detained the four occupants of a drug boat—one of them, with a military ID from Ceuta—loaded with flasks of gasoline.
Early Thursday morning, the chase between an overweight van with lights off and the police in the Sanlúcar area ended with the seizure of 111 bales and an AK-47 rifle, which they did not hesitate to use against the agents before. Operation Luster Paniagua, carried out by the police and the Tax Agency between October and now, has also ended with the seizure of three submachine guns, more drugs (four tons) and, in this case, nine detainees. The question now is whether the drug traffickers are returning to their lawless ways, driven by the end of some judicial processes from which, for now, they are not coming out very clear, and by the end of OCON, the organ of the Civil Guard who fought against drug trafficking until last year.
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