• Plan The war against drug traffickers overflows Cádiz and is extended to Malaga and Huelva

  • Courts Only one convicted among the 12 people who assaulted the La Línea hospital to get the drug trafficker Samuel Crespo out

  • Operation The last and final?

    Battle of the Civil Guard against the Castaña narco-clan

  • Chronicle The Line of the Narcos

It was 3:39 p.m. on February 6, 2018 when a group of hooded men violently broke into the treatment room of

the La Línea de la Concepción Hospital

(Cádiz) where a nurse and an assistant were treating Samuel Crespo.

In front, his nephew, Eduardo Morente, who punched one of the two agents who were guarding his uncle in the eye, who was taken away.

Crespo was at that time one of the main lieutenants of Antonio and Isco Tejón, better known in the Campo de Gibraltar region by the nickname of

the Castañas

and for being the leaders of one of the most powerful drug trafficking clans in the area.

That assault on a public hospital in broad daylight not only

exposed

the security forces, but above all, it showed in all its crudeness the magnitude that the phenomenon of drug trafficking and its derivatives had reached in the Campo de Gibraltar .

The Civil Guard detains Samuel Crespo, the 'lieutenant' of the Castaña family who was 'rescued' from the La Línea hospital in 2018. CIVIL GUARD

It also marked a turning point and forced the administrations to take

concrete measures

.

One of them was the implementation of the Special Security Plan for the Campo de Gibraltar, an ambitious initiative with which the Ministry of the Interior guaranteed investments and reinforcements of personnel to combat drug organizations that had at their disposal all the means that the (black) money could pay.

This week, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlaska, announced the

second extension

of the plan and the expansion of its scope of action to cover six of the eight Andalusian provinces: Almería, Granada and Seville, as well as Cádiz, Málaga and Huelva, including these last two in the first of the extensions of the plan in 2020.

The budget, for this year and the next, will amount to just over

35 million

euros, of which 16 million will go to reinforcing troops, both from the National Police Corps and the Civil Guard, and the other 19 million to material, technological and research support means.

Each extension of the plan has meant, above all, expanding its area of ​​operations starting from the

epicenter of drug trafficking

in the region, especially in 2018, which is Cádiz and, specifically, Campo de Gibraltar.

First, the neighboring provinces of Huelva and Málaga were included, and now those of Almería, Granada and Seville.

This has a lot to do with the trend observed by drug organizations to

diversify

and move their operations to areas with less pressure from the security forces, which is why in these years the stashes and arrests have multiplied beyond the limits of Cadiz.

But not only have drug traffickers diversified their areas of action, but also the substances with which they traffic.

According to Interior, marijuana

is experiencing a considerable increase

and plantations of this plant have multiplied.

However, the very balance of the Special Security Plan for the Campo de Gibraltar confirms what, on the ground, those who confront drug traffickers say, that this region of Cadiz, although it has seen how the activity of traffickers is reduced, continues to be, despite everything, ground zero.

The official statistics of the Ministry of the Interior show that the epicenter of drug trafficking continues in Cádiz, since of every one hundred

arrests

that have been made in the last four years, 20 have occurred in that province.

But the most illustrative data is that of the

drug seizures

that have been carried out in this time by the state security forces and bodies.

55% of all the drugs seized in all the provinces in which action has been taken was seized in Cádiz and, more precisely, in Campo de Gibraltar.

And one more fact in this regard: almost 49% of all judicialized operations, that is, directed by a judge, are also concentrated in this area.

According to the information provided by the Ministry of the Interior, since August 2018, 70,306 people have been arrested or investigated, of which 7,934 were directly linked to drug trafficking and smuggling, which represents 11.3% of the total. and, of them, 20% had the Campo de Gibraltar as the setting.

With regard to

operations and investigations

, there have been 9,070 in total, of which 7,299 have focused on drug trafficking and smuggling (80.5%) and 1,771 for money laundering (19.5%), an aspect in which both the Civil Guard and the National Police have focused on in recent times, with very important blows to the financial infrastructure of the drug clans.

Of these operations, 4,254 have been carried out in the municipalities of Campo de Gibraltar, 72.6% of them for drug trafficking and 27.4% for

money laundering

.

As for the judicial investigations, the total figure has been 5,957, of which 2,874 have been developed in the Cadiz region.

In these four years, likewise, more than a thousand tons of drugs have been seized, specifically

1,088 tons

, of which the majority, 91.3%, was hashish, 3.6% cocaine and 5% marijuana and other drugs.

Positive, but not enough

The extension of the Campo de Gibraltar Special Security Plan has been received positively, in general, but with

some objection

both from the professionals involved and from the social groups of the Campo de Gibraltar region.

The Unified Association of Civil Guards (AUGC) is the most critical and, in fact, describes the plan and its extension as

a "patch"

that is giving good results, points out Luis Bueno, from AUGC Cádiz, but that "does not end with the trouble".

The solution, he insists, is to increase the templates and the means, but not in a timely manner, but definitively, and that happens, he emphasizes Bueno, by updating a

catalog of jobs

that is absolutely out of date and, what is more, that neither It's not even 100% covered.

Of the current list of troops that the province of Cadiz should have, according to AUGC calculations, about 400 are missing.

To this we must add that the increasing extension of the plan is not accompanied by a

sufficient budget

and this means that material means that were going to reach Cádiz are also dispersed to other provinces.

"Happy, in general terms" are on the Por Tu Seguridad platform, which brings together social and neighborhood groups from the Campo de Gibraltar region.

His spokesperson, Francisco Mena, believes that the plan of the Ministry of the Interior is giving "good results", although he claims more.

"We are going to continue insisting that drug trafficking is not solved only with police measures, we must go further," says Mena, referring, for example, to the declaration of the region as

an area of ​​special singularity

for police officers who may arrive or the implementation of a comprehensive plan with investments that promote economic development and, above all, employment, the great scourge of Campo de Gibraltar that pushes many to be employed by drug trafficking networks.

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