//CORRECTED REPEAT//POLITICS-SPAIN: Sunny Coast Is Criminal Paradise

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Oct 5 1999 (IPS) - Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with its sunny beaches stretching from the Rock of Gibraltar to the French border, is a paradise for crime organisations of all stripes, say government officials.

The Spanish Interior Ministry has identified 170 organised crime groups with a total of approximately 5,200 members, including more than 1,100 women.

According the ministry’s reports, 80 percent of these gangs are made up of both Spaniards and foreigners, 12 percent are Spanish only, and the remaining eight percent are comprised of only foreigners.

The reason most of these groups are located on the Mediterranean coast seems to be the area’s climate and geographic location, as well as the fact that it also attracts the yachting set from all over the world and brings more than 60 million tourists to Spain each year.

Mariano Simancas, police inspector and director of Interpol in Spain, maintains that another important factor is the opening of borders within the European Union, which allows Europeans to travel from one country to another without any type of regulation.

The unique status of the Rock of Gibraltar – under British control but with Spain claiming sovereignty over it – contributes to the fact that criminal activity such as money laundering has become concentrated in nearby Spanish-controlled areas.

Gibraltar has an area of just six square km and a population of 30,000. In this tiny area, some 76,000 businesses are officially registered, of which 8,000 have branch offices in Spain.

The Spanish foreign office has charged the British government with neglect in controlling criminal activities. It claims that “dirty money,” mostly from drug-trafficking, is laundered in Gibraltar.

In 1998, Spain’s financial crime team carried out 19 investigations of Gibraltar-related crimes and found that some 40 million dollars in drug money had passed through the island community.

In addition, the country’s tax authority states that one third of the 74 million cartons of tobacco that entered Spain last year were smuggled from “the Rock.”

However, most of the organised crime activity centres on drug- trafficking – involving 59 percent of criminal groups, say sources from the Interior Ministry. The rest focus on money laundering, contraband, falsification of documents and smuggling of illegal immigrants.

The criminal activities of foreign gangs have also proven worrisome for the Spanish authorities, especially those involving groups from former Soviet Union countries, which are often allied with or subordinate to the powerful Italian mafia.

Concentrated along the Costa Brava, in the elite beach communities of Spain’s Catalonian region, are multi-millionaires, Arab sheiks and Russia’s “new rich.”

There, political power mixes with shady businesses, and is the reason Jesús Gil y Gil, mayor of the city of Marbella, faces investigations and indictment.

In just one year, Interpol has sent Spain arrest and extradition orders for over a thousand foreign criminals. The multinational police organisation, headquartered in Lyon, France, says it has evidence that the criminals can be found in Spain.

But it is not just an issue of getting the Spanish police to investigate, identify and arrest the criminals – foreign or not. Criminals can also be found among the police’s own ranks.

Máximo Blanco, a lieutenant colonel in the Guardia Civil (Spain’s militarised police), was arrested in early August as a result of investigations into shipments of 5,400 kilos of hashish arriving on the Mediterranean coast.

Blanco was second-in-command at Intxaurrondo headquarters in the Basque city of San Sebastian, under the command of general Enrique Rodríguez Galindo.

Rodríguez Galindo was previously tried and placed on probation, accused of ordering attacks against the independent movement Basques during Spain’s “dirty war” (1983-1987) under socialist president Felipe González.

At the time, and until 1992, Blanco was in charge of Intxaurrondo Fiscal and Anti-drug Information. Investigations tied him to José Manuel Olarte, assassinated by Basque separatists who claimed he was a drug-trafficking chief.