Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 19.12.20

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 

 

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I've commented that Pontevedra city has a disproportionate number of jewellery stores. Yesterday I noted that, in the centre, there are 2 adjacent and a 3rd less than 50m away. My suspicion is they're an excellent option for the laundering of the vast sums arising from our main local industry - drug smuggling. But I could be wrong.

I swear I wrote that paragraph before I read the article below on this subject, entitled: 

Europe’s first narco-submarine capture reveals changing tactics of drug cartels.

Another nail in the coffin of Franco's Most Holy Catholic Spain. Which won't please the pseudo-fascists of Vox, nor the real fascists of the parties to the right of it.

Pontevedra has a male prostitute who's getting more and more flamboyant with the passing years. Yesterday he passed me resplendent in orange hair and coat of many colours that would have given Joseph a good run for his money. Him not me. It was all I could do to resist taking a foto to post here. At least from behind him, as he passed.

Here's María's Riding The Wave Day 35.  

The UK

In Piers Plowman - of c. 1370  - there's the first written reference to the folk hero, Robin Hood. Yesterday, I also learned that London's 14th century prostitutes used to congregate in Cocks Lane. Possibly just one of those odd coincidences. The lane still exists, by the way, near St Bart's hospital. But is now singular. As it was - sort of - back then, I guess.

Germany

I cited criticism of the EU powerhouse yesterday. This article - on the deluded worship of the country and its leader - is even more pungent.

English

Reader Perry advises - on the issue of Southern English (and Northern posh) pronunciation that The Binscombe Tales of John Whitbourn call the English southern provinces Sutangli. Where I'm sure they never used the long 'a' sound.

Finally . . .

Still no new passport. BUT . . . The courier company DHL messaged me last evening to say they'd picked it up from the government office yesterday and would deliver it on the 22nd. Respectively, 9 and 13 days after I was told it was 'on its way' to me. 

By pure coincidence, I picked up a DHL package for a friend in a local shop last night. But DHL tell me that, if I'm not in when they come next Tuesday, I'll have to pick up my passport not in Pontevedra but 27km away in Vigo. Where, incidentally, I'm not allowed to go. And their web page doesn't allow me to nominate anywhere else. IGIMSTS.

I'm guessing that, to the British government, 'on its way' means something akin to what my friend Ester means when she says 'Am arriving' when she's thinking of leaving her house some time in the next hour.

THE ARTICLE

 

Europe’s first narco-submarine capture reveals changing tactics of drug cartels

new: Isambard Wilkinson, The Times

A year after seizing a craft carrying three tonnes of cocaine from the Amazon to Galicia, Spain’s Guardia Civil gives The Times unprecedented access to the agents involved, revealing the cat-and-mouse game playing out on their shores

Trudging in darkness before dawn along the wintry shore, the two Guardia Civil agents stopped in their tracks as they spotted a solitary car parked behind a beach with its headlights flashing out to sea. The force had received intelligence that a smuggling vessel was heading towards Spain’s rugged northwest Galician coast, a region renowned as a conduit for cocaine arriving in Europe from Latin America. After days of storms had prevented any sighting, the Guardia Civil had picked up the radar trace of a craft heading suspiciously slowly towards the coast the previous evening. Its expected landing point was Ria de Aldan, one of the region’s deep fjord-like inlets.

Agents Miguel Z and Jose B were part of a network of personnel deployed around the likely disembarkation area. When they quizzed the driver of the parked car and searched inside, they found three sets of dry clothes, blankets and energy bars. Their discovery in the early hours of November 25 last year was critical to the first, and so far only, capture of a “narco-submarine” on Europe’s coast.

The force’s investigation has now been completed, the vessel’s crew are behind bars and awaiting trial, and the submarine’s 3,050kg cargo of cocaine — worth €100 million — has been destroyed. But what do we know about the smugglers’ 4,300-mile odyssey from Brazil across the Atlantic and the events that led to the seizure? What has the investigation revealed about the trade? And has the operation had any lasting effect?

Colonel Simón Venzal, the head of the capture operation, is commander of the Guardia Civil in Pontevedra, a province that is home to fishing villages and farms as close-knit and inscrutable as their cramped wind-blown cemeteries. In the 1940s its clans smuggled basic items such as sugar and soap from Portugal. The trade moved to American tobacco in the 1960s, when they perfected the art of transferring contraband from container ships to fishing trawlers far out to sea. They evolved to smuggling hashish from Morocco and from there to Colombian cocaine. In the 1990s the clans became notorious for their drug lords, who built exuberant villas and drove ostentatious cars.

But the commander said that times are changing once more. Although Galicia’s drug clans are still in business, their methods are different. “The narco-sub drug run appears to be typical of the new operations, which are not all controlled by one big clan or gang but are increasingly diffuse and atomised,” he said. “So you see small freelance operatives for hire, working with everyone from Serbians and Albanians to Colombians.” He pointed to the criminal career of Agustín Álvarez, the narco-submarine’s skipper, as indicative of the shifting patterns of Galicia’s drug-smuggling business. Entrepreneurial freelancers like him are tapping the region’s longstanding status as Europe’s gateway for cocaine as traffickers use new methods to transport their cargo. The 29-year-old from Vigo city, a former boxer who won Spain’s amateur championship, had been “increasingly drawn in to the drugs trade, lured by making quick money on a freelance basis”, said the colonel. Already known to the Guardia Civil before he took a flight from Madrid to Brazil in October last year to join the smuggling craft, he had prepared for his role by taking sailing courses. Álvarez landed in the Brazilian city of Manaus on October 25 and travelled eastwards to a clandestine base in the jungle near the Amazon river where he met his two crewmen, Luis Tomás Benítez, 42, and Pedro Roberto Delgado, 44, cousins from a fishing village in Ecuador. Guardia Civil officials say there are indications that Álvarez may have sailed on the route before and that the Ecuadorians had plied the Colombia to Mexico route.

With the 22m-long fibreglass vessel launched into the river and 152 bales of cocaine from Colombia’s Vaupes region stowed aboard, on October 28 the crew of three embarked on what they had imagined would be a ten-day voyage to the Azores before heading north to Galicia. They had a basic compass and a satellite phone. It took only about 12 hours to reach the mouth of the Amazon. Then the problems began. “It was a highly risky mission to cross the Atlantic in a homemade type of boat on a major shipping route,” said Col Venzal. The craft, a makeshift semi-submersible that travelled with only its tiny slit-windowed 30cm-tall conning tower above the surface, was soon caught in days of storms and nearly crushed by a passing ship. 

The crew, living off tins of food — heated on a small stove when the weather allowed — took turns at the wheel in the tiny bridge and slept on top of compartments beside it. “Living in a vessel that was badly ventilated, polluted with diesel fumes, suffocatingly hot and cramped and exposed to the danger of storms and collisions, there were moments when the crew thought they were going to die,” said the commander.

On November 13, 16 days after their departure, they arrived off the Azores where British intelligence picked up their scent and tipped off the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre in Lisbon, an international agency set up to co-ordinate anti-drug trafficking action by several EU states. Portuguese naval vessels and a helicopter were deployed to search for the semi-submersible but bad weather made it impossible. The crew now knew from the activity around them that they had been detected. British intelligence learnt that the craft attempted a rendezvous to offload its cargo about 150 miles from the Portuguese coast. But one of the two smugglers’ speedboats that had set out from the Algarve to meet it encountered engine problems and the attempt ended in failure. “For 72 hours the craft, hit by another storm, maintained its position before failing to make a second meeting that was called off due to the presence of Portuguese patrols,” said Captain Francisco Torres, an agent in the Guardia Civil’s Madrid-based anti-narcotics unit. “Their only option was to sail north to the coast of Galicia.”

Rumours that cartels were using submarines on the route from Colombia to Mexic  began in the 1990s, and in 2006 the authorities intercepted one off Costa Rica with 3.5 tonnes of cocaine on board. Speculation that submarines were being used to deliver cocaine to Galicia had been circulating in recent years, but police had never been able to confirm their existence.

As greater amounts of drugs flowed into the region, they hoped to finally capture an elusive prize. On November 21 the craft entered Spanish waters off the Rias Baixas. Three days later, agents spotted a rudder-trace on radar of a vessel passing the island of Ons and heading towards the Ria de Aldan. [Where I nearly bought a house in 2000] “It was moving unusually slowly and we could only see it intermittently, which made us believe it could be our target,” said Agent Monica B. “It was tense and exciting and we began to think we had a chance of a historic seizure.”

On a sunny day, in conditions quite different from those prevailing on the morning of the operation, Colonel Venzal, along with agents Miguel Z and Jose B, accompanied The Times to O Foxo beach to explain how the hunt had come to a head. The thin, sparsely populated peninsula dotted with woods, small holiday homes and shacks was where the agents discovered the parked car and sets of dry clothes. Agent Miguel Z described how afterwards, as they approached the beach with their torches, they saw three figures clambering over rocks. “We shouted ‘halt’ and they started to run across the beach and back into the sea. I went straight down onto the beach and Jose cut round the back to head them off.” The agents managed to capture Benítez, one of the Ecuadorians. “He was wearing a wetsuit, carrying a waterproof bag of dry clothes and was shattered with tiredness,” said Miguel. “The first excuse he gave was that he was a stowaway who had been put ashore.” Within half an hour, other agents had arrested his cousin a few hundred metres away. Having been at sea for 28 days, they were starving and at their physical limits. Álvarez had escaped. After the first arrest a Guardia Civil vessel patrolling near the ria’s mouth powered towards the scene. On board the patrol boat used that night, Sergeant Eugenio C pointed to the area 50 metres off O Foxo beach where the action took place. “We scanned the water with infra-red binoculars and torches,” he said. “We realised that what we had at first thought was a triangular rock protruding from the water was the last part of the stern of a sinking boat.” Álvarez had scuttled the boat by opening valves designed for the purpose, with the intention that its cargo be salvaged later. Agents secured a line to the sinking craft before it was dragged out to sea. A diving team quickly retrieved a bale of cocaine floating inside the flooded hull. After nearly three days of hauling the craft in rough conditions it reached the port of Aldan. Finally, before dawn on November 28, two giant cranes lifted it, dripping and gleaming under spotlights, on to the quayside, its cargo of 152 bales of cocaine oily but intact.

The next day Álvarez was found hiding in one of the summer huts a few hundred metres from O Foxo beach. Over the next weeks four others, connected to the skipper, including the driver who had been found with the sets of dry clothes, were arrested and charged with drug trafficking and belonging to a criminal organisation. It was a rare victory against a tenacious and increasingly inventive global network of traffickers, leading to an investigation that is prying deeper into the old clans and their links to international smuggling.

But the game of cat and mouse remains as intense as ever and Guardia Civil officials concede that cocaine trafficking is still booming. The spectre of the clans remains in the background, although investigators have not made explicit their links to the narco-sub and its freelance crew. “The integration of the Guardia Civil resources, from investigation to patrolling units, as well as hard work and luck on the spot were crucial to the success of the operation,” said Col Venzal. “This kind of vessel is very difficult to detect. It may not happen again.”

Cocaine-smuggling in a pandemic

The capture of the “narco-submarine” and restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic have not stemmed a rising tide of cocaine being smuggled into Europe through Galicia’s coast. The trend reflects shipments to elsewhere in Europe. In the first three months of this year the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime confiscated 17.5 tonnes of cocaine bound for Europe in South American ports, mostly Brazilian, nearly a 20 per cent rise compared with the same period in 2019. During the pandemic, kingpins have packed huge loads of cocaine into the fewer container ships sailing and commercial aircraft flying, the unit’s officials say. In Spain, which intercepts the second highest amount of cocaine in Europe after Belgium, Guardia Civil agents seized 11.5 tonnes in the first half of 2019. In the first five months of this year they seized 12.5 tonnes. Agents said that no estimates exist for the amount of cocaine arriving in Spain, but that lower prices indicate booming trade. At the end of March, only four months after the capture of the semi-submersible, the Guardia Civil seized 3.2 tonnes of cocaine on two high-speed boats in the heart of the Rias Baixas. At the time the country was under Europe’s strictest lockdown. The operation discovered that the smugglers had collected the drug from a yacht 100 miles off the Spanish coast after it had crossed the ocean with the merchandise from Latin America. Eleven people were arrested, including two Peruvians. The following day the force detected that the yacht was scuttled by the smugglers in international waters. Guardia Civil officers have also detected an African route, with cargo ships arriving from Brazil anchored off countries such as Equatorial Guinea, where they offload on to smaller boats. The force has intercepted sailing boats that transit from there to the Canary Islands, the Azores and Galicia.

Last month the Guardia Civil tightened the noose around one of Galicia’s notorious gangs when it arrested a leader of the Pastelero clan with more than 500kg of cocaine, along with two Serbians and three fellow gallegos from Pontevedra’s smuggling badland of O Salnés.

“In less than a year we have seen signs on the ground that the cocaine business continues, in spite of the pandemic, at full throttle,” said Colonel Venzal.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious

Protestant.