Walter Finch
POLICE have broken up a network of drug houses in the centre of Marbella that each catered to a different drug and user.
While one locale would sell cocaine, another would deal in hash and a third in marijuana, with the criminal network operating them targeting a different profile of drug user in the Costa del Sol hub.
Marbella police went undercover in the community in January to track down the houses after neighbours began to complain about the narco activity.
Through observing the neighbourhood around Calle Las Peñuelas they managed to identify the criminal gang, which operated differently with varying hours depending on the drug being sold.
Police made five simultaneous raids on the Marbella homes and rounded up 13 individuals – including one narco who had several outstanding arrest and imprisonment warrants.
They also confiscated various weapons, €1,330 in cash, around twenty bags of cocaine, hashish packets, and a bag containing marijuana.
Violent and drug-related crime has been soaring in Marbella this year as narco gangs increasingly move their operations east because of a continued police crackdown further down the coast.
This is the verdict of Ana Isabel Cerezo, a director at the Andalucian Institute of Criminology, who gave a talk on the scourge of so-called narcos at the University of Malaga last week, alongside other experts.
She told attendees how an ‘intensive and exhaustive’ ramping up of surveillance in and around Algeciras is pushing mafia activity towards the Costa del Sol.
The port of Algeciras is one of the most important entry points for drugs in Europe due to its strategic location.
It sits just across the Gibraltar Strait from Morocco, the biggest hashing exporting country in the world, and is one of the first ports of call – alongside Galicia in the north – for cocaine and other drugs being shipped from South America.
But a police crackdown over the past year has, according to Cerezo, made Marbella a ‘very attractive’ option for drug traffickers looking for alternative delivery routes.
