The powder keg of La Línea

I liken it to walking into the house and noticing a strong smell of butane. Your first reaction is to turn on the light, but if you want to prevent everything from exploding, you better open the windows and wait for it to air out ». Helenio Fernández is deputy mayor in La Línea de la Concepción, that border city viciously punished by unemployment and whose mere mention evokes the smuggling of hashish (in the Campo de Gibraltar 60% of what is intercepted in Spain is seized). It has been a few days that he does not wish them even on his worst enemy. The death by drowning of two ‘petaqueros’, as those who supply fuel to the narcolanchas are known in the area, has unleashed a social outbreak and open the seams of La Atunara, a marginal neighborhood where, according to its mayor, the independent Juan Franco – 21 of the 25 councilors – it is not strange to see the ‘gums’ enter the beach at four in the morning and groups of young people put the bales in a safe place until the police fence cools down.

The tragedy broke out on the morning of May 10, Monday, when a private boat collected the bodies of Miguel Ángel A., 51, and Sergio R., 19, two miles from the coast. They were not long in being assisted by a Civil Guard patrol boat, that he abandoned the search for the pilot of a helicopter that had crashed three days earlier in the Straits to try to save the castaways. Once on the ground, National Police agents tried to revive the victims with cardiorespiratory maneuvers, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

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Meanwhile, an audio began to circulate on social networks, blaming the armed institute for the two deaths due to omission of relief and focusing on an agent (the Civil Guard investigates three people as alleged perpetrators of a crime of incitement to hatred and threats). The reaction was immediate. CHundreds of neighbors took to the streets, throwing stones at police vans, burning containers and chanting slogans such as ‘Take them away, but don’t take their lives’. Graffiti on the walls alluded to the agents as ‘Government hitmen’. The wildfire had started to burn and ahead were three nights of riots that at its peak came to concentrate 800 people and 70 riot police to fight them.

“What happened is not just another hubbub, the neighborhood’s spontaneous reaction to the deterioration that they have suffered for decades,” Antonio Flores Escamilla, provincial secretary of the Unified Police Union (SUP) in Cádiz, reported this week. I’m talking about real ambushes, with power cuts and shots. A deliberate and planned attempt to do harm orchestrated by the mafias, to whom the forces and security forces of the State we have cornered in the last two years, curtailing their income». The strategy, maintains his colleague Mariló Valencia, is to feed discontent as a distraction maneuver, “because we know that while the comrades were containing the disturbances, the unloading of caches took place in other parts of the coast.”

Smuggling, «the natural»

La Línea has been – and is, according to many – a city “abandoned to its fate”, which for a long time fed on the ‘matuteo’ of tobacco that came from Gibraltar and then on hashish sent from Morocco. This is explained by Paco Mena, president of the Alternativas anti-drug coordinator and spokesperson for the platform ‘For our safety, for everyone’s’, under whose umbrella work from reintegration associations to unions of the National Police, Civil Guard or Customs Surveillance. «HThere is a part of the population, mainly in unstructured neighborhoods such as La Atunara, San Bernardo or Los Junquillos, where drug trafficking has found fertile ground and smuggling is the most natural thing in the world, because this has been the main source of income throughout its history.

Mena refers to that underworld inhabited the same by kids who charge 1,000 euros for a night monitoring the movements of the Police, than 40,000 for driving a 14-meter long boat equipped with four 350-horsepower engines loaded with 3,500 kilos of hashish. “If you add to this that unemployment reaches crazy levels in these areas –80% among those under 30 years old–, the result is a scenario where social problems are very difficult to manage. Marginality, lack of opportunities and little training of the neighbors end up turning the neighborhood into a pressure cooker ready to burst at any moment.

How do you redirect a sector of the population that lacks any professional horizon, but that gets ahead thanks to the underground economy and paid by the mafias? «First, restoring the principle of authority and establishing tools for anyone who wants to change, can do it, which is not easy because fear and threats are common currency», Flores himself answered.

No one doubts the police results achieved, the result of constant pressure on an enemy accustomed to reinventing himself, to rearm himself and to whom, as Helenio Fernández says, “heads out like a hydra.” In the last two years, the drug ring has registered records of seizures and detainees, while judicial coverage has been strengthened by opening three new investigating courts, appointing new prosecutors, incorporating magistrates to the Provincial Court..

A two-speed plan

The question is, are punitive measures enough to tackle the problem? Neither Flores nor Mena believe it. Neither did Juan Lozano, president of the Campo de Gibraltar Commonwealth, aware that if organized crime feeds on anything, it is from a lack of opportunities. “The root problem is the high unemployment rates, especially among the young population. And this is where the central and regional governments have a challenge, because the kids You have to offer them a future, you have to excite them with something that right now they don’t have». A situation, Helenio Fernández abounds, aggravated by absenteeism in the classrooms and the consequent school failure.

David Morales, professional dancer and favorite son of La Línea, knew Miguel Ángel A. from a young age, when the two were playing in La Atunara, between the church of Carmen and the pier where a few days ago the judicial procession raised his body. He was a survivor, a hustler. It seems that here everyone who is dedicated to drugs has two cars, four houses and spends 500 euros on champagne, but it is not like that. We have spent years witnessing the loss of one generation after another, people who give up looking for alternatives. You cannot get ahead by throwing yourself into the arms of drug trafficking, resigning yourself to making easy money. If measures are not taken to revitalize the social fabric, the aid you distribute will not matter because what you will have will be a society without the ability to react.

That this happens in the vicinity of the port of Algeciras, the one with the most traffic in the Mediterranean and a source of wealth for all of Andalusia, contravenes the laws of logic. Also that La Línea has spent a century –literally– claiming the status of Free Trade Zone, a figure that translates into tax advantages “that here neither exist nor are expected”, Helenio slides, desolate. Gemma Araujo, PSOE deputy for Cádiz in Congress and mayor of La Línea between 2011 and 2015, talks about ‘underlying problem’ “When the Administration is not able to give alternatives to a kid like Sergio, who at 19 had to be studying and not transporting fuel pouches to the narcolanchas.”

Araujo assures that the situation will change, that “since 2019 there is a document on the table with nine ministries involved.” It refers to the Campo de Gibraltar Comprehensive Plan, which has proven its effectiveness in police and justice matters – and which includes the creation three years ago in Algeciras of the Office for the Recovery of Assets from criminal activities -; but the fulfillment of which leaves much to be desired in everything related to measures that promote education, employment or investment in infrastructure. Araujo recalls that the Junta de Andalucía has transferred powers and that for the problem to be solved, everyone must row in the same direction.

Mena is tired of hearing about the dynamics of the movement. «The region in general and La Línea in particular has been the dump of the miseries of this country and now it has overflowed. Either the State will put the batteries or this is difficult to fix.