The drug traffickers take over the port of Barbate with impunity due to the lack of resources of the Civil Guard

Friday of political fanfare in Algeciras. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, announces another rain of millions for the fourth expansion of the special plan to fight against drug trafficking in the Strait. “It's a police success story,” he declares exultantly. It rains and winds with rage in the province with the driest in Spain. Just 72 kilometers from there, already during the afternoon, the mayor of Barbate, Miguel Molina, receives some videos on his cell phone. Up to six appear narcolanchas refugees from the storm in the port of their town. Fed up with not seeing a single patrol car for months, he calls the Civil Guard of Cádiz and asks them to send someone. On the other end of the phone they tell him that they will do it, despite the fact that the Maritime Service of the armed institute has had its boats damaged since Tuesday. From Algeciras, they send him a zodiac barely six meters long and an engine to deter the occupants of powerful four-motor semi-rigid boats. Two of his six agents will end up dead at 8:30 p.m., murdered by six of the traffickers after they run over him with their RIB.

“That was not the right way. The measures were unfortunate and disproportionate,” summarizes the mayor, visibly affected. The event has revived old ghosts in Barbate, a fishing town that during the turn of the millennium suffered firsthand the drama of hashish and that today is pleased to have at least reduced its unemployment rate “from 53% to 27%,” as Molina points out. But it has also opened the spigot of indignation among agents and judicial forces who have been warning for months that drug traffickers were returning to those jurisdictions of violence and impudence that made them famous in La Línea in 2018. “They are grown up, like then,” points out one of those judicial sources.

It seems the most plausible motivation to understand how the six occupants of one of the six 14-meter-long semi-rigid boats that took shelter from the storm in Barbate understood that the best thing was not to escape, as did the rest of the boats. That the ideal thing was to start making dangerous movements around the officers' zodiac and then face them in a straight line and on a collision course until passing over them in a violent crash.

The impact, described as a “murder” by Grande-Marlaska this Saturday in Cádiz, immediately cost the life of Miguel Ángel Gómez González, a 39-year-old GEAS agent (submariners) from San Fernando (Cádiz), with partner and a daughter, and David Pérez Carracedo, from the GAR (Rapid Action Groups), who was 43 years old, a native of Barcelona, ​​who was married and had two children. In addition, two more civil guards were injured and two more were unharmed.

After the event – which is being investigated by Court number 1 of Barbate as a homicide – the Civil Guard intensified the search for the six occupants of the narcolancha. The first three fell at dawn, while they were getting off the boat and two more people (also detained) were waiting for them on land. The other three who fled were captured around noon, as Marlaska explained, without providing further details. Some of the detainees on the boat are in their twenties and have a history of drug trafficking crimes, as confirmed by official sources, and at least two are from La Línea de la Concepción and Ceuta, as explained by unofficial sources. The same sources attribute the piloting work to a trafficker known as Kiko, the goatmember of the clan of Pezpussettled between the Campo de Gibraltar area and Marbella, and little known in the media, but “they have taken over everything after the departure of other bigger companies.”

The fact that the drug traffickers were not known in Barbate did not prevent the undetermined group of people who recorded them in action from cheering them on with shouts such as “attack them with two balls”, “get on top and throw them to the bottom” or “hit them hard” from one of the port's breakwaters. “Some nonsense. This is no longer the drug town it was before,” says a patron who prefers not to give his name while he drinks a bottle of beer at noon this Saturday. The man from the sea was in that same place on Friday afternoon and he did not realize that something was happening in the water until he saw “the mess” on land. But he was used to seeing those narcolanchas protected from storms in a port known among sailors for being easy to access on days of rough seas: “They have been doing it for at least three years.” Another indignant parishioner adds: “They think the port is theirs, but it is not.”

The mayor of Barbate was not aware that drug traffickers “from outside”, as he insists on clarifying, used those red and green buoys that have marked the mouth of the dock for so long. But he was clear about the social alarm generated by his presence, in a context in which “for months” he has not seen a patrol boat from the Maritime Service of the Command of the Civil Guard of Cádiz, competent in this area. An agent from this institution confirms that they have long been unable to cover that area of ​​the coast by sea. Hence, this past Friday afternoon, Molina called for help, alarmed by the audacity “of someone who finds himself in a perfect shelter because there is no security.” To the other side they told him that “they were going to proceed shortly.” But the Maritime Service had had its three boats inoperative since Tuesday, something that has happened on other occasions, as confirmed by that same agent. This lack of resources – Interior has already announced the purchase of new vessels -, together with a change of shifts that were not very operational to cover so much coastline and the apparent decline in complex investigation operations to dismantle groups, became a perfect storm.

To cover the call for help from a mayor who also complains that his Civil Guard post now only has “one ground patrol,” the Command decided to send GEAS agents—accompanied by GAR guards—who They are based in the port of Algeciras, aboard one of their zodiacs which, thanks to their small size, can be transported by van over land for a quick response. “It's like confronting a jihadist with a slingshot,” says one agent. “I have never seen this in all the years I have been in the specialty. It would be necessary to investigate who ordered that device in Barbate and demand accountability. No one with the specialty of the Maritime Service would have embarked for that operation,” points out another. Sources from the armed institute only specify that this is not the first time that this type of boat has been used to deter traffickers and that the emphasis needs to be placed on the “unexpected” response of the alleged perpetrators of the attack.

But among the agents, the judicial forces and the Cadiz society, stupor has spread quickly. The Civil Guard associations AUGC and Jucil have called for Marlaska's resignation. More than 3,000 people – according to Molina's calculations – took to the streets of Barbate this Saturday to support the dead civil guards. The idea was only to demonstrate in the Town Hall square, but, spontaneously, they ended up marching to the Barbate Civil Guard post, where in the afternoon the flag was already flying at half-mast. “It has happened there, but it could have happened in the Guadalquivir or in Sancti Petri [entre Chiclana y San Fernando]. In all these places it is increasingly common to see narcolanchas“, points out a judicial source, in reference to points in which in recent months there has been the death of a trafficker after an accident with a patrol boat and the death of four drowned immigrants after being thrown from a semi-rigid boat. “They act with treachery and impudence. They know that there are not enough means, also in Justice. They don't care because they believe they go unpunished,” the same source points out indignantly.

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