SPANISH police and their Ecuadorian counterparts have continued to dismantle a sprawling international cocaine cartel whose tentacles have spread all over Spain.
The latest move involved 21 arrests in Ecuador on October 8, in 23 simultaneous raids carried out with Europol, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry.
Investigators say the gang hid cocaine among bananas, seafood, cacao and timber shipped to Europe and the United Arab Emirates through a web of at least 15 export companies, and that it has been active since 2019.
Police have link the network to 14 cocaine seizures in Ecuador, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands that add up to 42.5 tonnes, with 18 tonnes of it bound for Spain.
Spanish police say the gang bought its cocaine from laboratories in Colombia and worked with Balkan gangs and the Netherlands-based Mocro Mafia, whose members helped receive the shipments in Europe.
Its alleged leader has lived in the United Arab Emirates since 2023, while those held in Ecuador include two serving Ecuadorian police officers and a suspected financier of ‘Pipo’, the Los Lobos gang boss arrested in Malaga last November.
The roots of the operation lie in Spain, where it began in October 2024 when police found 13 tonnes of cocaine hidden among bananas in a container from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port, at Algeciras, the biggest cocaine seizure in Spanish history up to that point.
Detectives pursuing that shipment arrested Oscar Sanchez Gil weeks later, a chief inspector who headed the UDEF in Madrid, the Policia Nacional’s economic and financial crime unit.
Astonishingly, they found more than €20 million hidden in the walls and false ceilings of his home in Alcala de Henares, a city east of Madrid, and a further €1 million in his office.
Investigators allege he used police databases to find out which containers other units had flagged, helping the traffickers avoid inspections, and suspect he was paid about €1 million for each shipment.
Judge Francisco de Jorge of the National Court (Audiencia Nacional) has since formally charged him with drug trafficking, money laundering, bribery and revealing secrets, though Sanchez Gil denies being the person the gang called ‘Aduana’ (customs) in its encrypted messages.
The judge has also charged Ignacio Toran, the alleged head of the network in Spain, who is in custody and accused of smuggling 73 tonnes of cocaine into Spain in 39 containers since at least 2020, while its alleged international boss, Alejandro Salgado, known as ‘El Tigre’, is on the run after fleeing Dubai.
Police arrested 14 more people on July 1 in Madrid, Guadalajara, Barcelona, Tarragona and Malaga on suspicion of laundering the network’s profits, two of them serving Policia Nacional officers, taking the total detained since the Algeciras seizure to about 30, according to the EFE news agency.
Algeciras is now back in the frame after the Policia Nacional’s internal affairs unit told the judge it had found signs of a possible separate corruption plot linked to cocaine entering the port.
The report followed testimony in May in which Sanchez Gil said the encrypted messages referred to container dates, agents’ shift schedules, payments of up to €200,000 and having ‘control of all the port staff’.
Internal affairs investigators found references to customs and Guardia Civil officials and to what is probably the customs risk-analysis unit at Algeciras, though they say they cannot identify who was involved, and police sources have suggested Sanchez Gil is trying to undermine the case against him by questioning how it began.
Anti-drugs prosecutors had not yet analysed the report in September to decide whether to open a specific investigation, sources there said.
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