When Miguel’s father, a well-established civil servant, discovered that his son was involved in drug trafficking, he couldn’t stop crying. “I had nightmares that I would end up in jail… And in the end I went in, but for something I had not done,” Miguel recalls in a somber voice, hidden behind a fictitious name. In the period of more than 25 years that goes from that bitter moment to the present, Miguel has had time to do almost everything: from embarking on boats packed with hashish in the Strait to being his own boss in the drug trade; and from entering the Civil Guard “by accident” to ending up defenestrated in the force for an accusation that was acquitted. He has reached his 44 years with one certainty: “I wanted to amend my past, but in the Civil Guard they never forgave me for being the boy from the dark past.”
Miguel was arrested in February 2016 and acquitted in the spring of 2023 by the Provincial Court of Cádiz, which declared most of the investigation null and void. He maintains that it was a “persecution without evidence.” And he assures that it is a similar way of proceeding that is now being denounced by several leaders of OCON Sur, the Civil Guard group in charge of the fight against drug trafficking, about an alleged setup concocted in an investigation against them. The agent – who is still a member of the force, although he is now on leave – decided to speak with this newspaper, to tell his story, days before some drug traffickers murdered two agents in the port of Barbate (Cádiz). And it was confirmed in his story days later, when, as a result of that crime, the entire political debate about the investigation into OCON Sur took place.
Miguel was arrested at his workplace, early one morning in March 2016, along with more than a dozen people, accused by the Udyco of the National Police and the Internal Affairs Service (SAI), the same units. who investigated the heads of OCON. They were investigating him for being part of a network that introduced hashish on board trucks through the port of Algeciras. He accuses investigators of tampering with evidence and using coercive techniques. During the 14 months that his preventive detention lasted, the civil guard claims that he received two visits from SAI personnel, one of them accompanied by the investigating police officer, in which he asserts that they pressured him to sign “a statement prepared to wallpaper” three guards. . Among them were David Oliva and Javier Fuentes, the OCON bosses now under investigation. “They asked me for anything from them. They said they wanted to help me, but it was a trap. They told me that, if not, they would put my wife in an investigation for money laundering or that they would tell her about false extramarital relationships,” adds Miguel, who unsuccessfully reported these alleged pressures to the Penitentiary Surveillance Court and the Prosecutor’s Office.
“For me there was never a presumption of internal innocence, they just wanted me to affirm something that was not the case,” says the agent. The Civil Guard, asked by this newspaper, declines to give explanations, claiming that it is not going to “justify the work of Internal Affairs” since it is a unit that “acts with discretion.” Judicial sources point out that it is not prohibited for investigators to try to obtain information from prisoners by offering them prison benefits in exchange, but they add that “it is not legal” to use coercion techniques. Furthermore, they add that “just because of what someone says you cannot start an investigation.”
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An impossible change
“I have committed crimes worse than the one I was accused of, but never using my status as a civil guard, unlike other colleagues who have become criminals,” says Miguel. He does not hide his past as a drug trafficker. He embarked for the first time on a hashish boat at the end of the 90s, just when the business was in full conversion from wooden boats to the first semi-rigid boats, smaller and less powerful than the current ones. “The business then has nothing to do with the business now. I’m from a generation where if they caught you, they caught you. The law of the sea is to help and look today,” he explains in reference to the recent murder of two colleagues in Barbate who were run over by a drug boat.
Miguel, son of a middle-class family in the Strait area, entered the world of drugs when he was just a teenager: “My desire became to return home with money every day.” First was point —in slang, those who give hints of police presence—, and then he embarked on hashish boats. “They were years of sewing and singing,” she remembers. The rise in drug trafficking came quickly — “I touched little water,” he says — and he soon found himself organizing drug shipments from Morocco to the peninsula through Malaga: “I was my own boss. I have always worked with the strongest.” During those years, Miguel combined his prosperous and dangerous business at sea with his position as a soldier, which he joined in the last years of his mandatory military service.
The change came unexpectedly in 2004, when he decided to join the car of a group of classmates who were going to take their exams at the Civil Guard Academy in Baeza (Jaén) “to get the days off” and go party. He passed without a place. Then, he passed the physical tests. “I am a civil guard by accident, not by vocation,” he admits bluntly, “but upon entering I wanted to make a change in my life and leave that world behind.” “I had to explain to my drug dealers that I was leaving him just when we had hit El Palo. [un barrio de Málaga]so my cousin stayed in front, but he ended up arrested shortly after,” explains the agent.
The scandal accompanied Miguel from his beginnings in the Civil Guard. The rumor that he was a drug trafficker accompanied him. He was even investigated in a money laundering case for a drug boat that was under his name, although the case came to nothing. “They chose to disown me,” he says. And so he ended up hooking up destinations in Madrid, Barcelona or the Basque Country. But Miguel had informants in hashish, in turn interconnected with other criminal organizations with blood crimes or linked to jihadism. “There were officers who realized that he could contribute things, so they thought: ‘Instead of disowning you, we are going to take advantage of you,’” he recalls. He only set one condition: “That they not ask me for drug things because I am not a shit that he gives to his friends. But in citizen security and terrorism I participated in everything possible.” They were years of clarifying events that involved hitmen and even finding the first captured jihadists who ended up in Syria, for which he received congratulations.
The agent came to believe that the Civil Guard could be his redemption, until the investigation that surrounded him for eight years reminded him that the force had not forgotten its past: “Let young people know that what they do now has consequences for the future.” rest of his days,” he emphasizes. So when he found out that new investigations pointed to other colleagues, he understood that he only owed loyalty to them: “[David] Oliva and Javi [Fuentes] They are honest, and they are not going to be corrupted by a third-rate hashish clan. I warned them that they were going after them long before what the investigation says to try to bribe them and reveal secrets. I found out because they [los investigadores] They went to drug traffickers and other investigated agents that they knew. It doesn’t matter if they are convicted, they wanted to get them out of the way.” This is exactly what he declared in April 2023 before the judge of the National Court in the case investigating the heads of OCON, now in Court number 5 in Parla.
In all these years, Miguel has never lost his friends in the underworld of hashish, although he assures that he is no longer dedicated to it. He does not hide that the benefits of the drug have helped him lead a comfortable life: “I have money and property. I have been a drug trafficker, but I have used my money in my life, my house. “The majority have no head and do not think that this is going to end.” The agent remains aware of the course of the business, which nourishes a thriving black economy that moves through a network of money changers. “They move your money, it’s like a bizum. You have your money changer in Marbella and your supplier in Morocco and that way you can make purchases and sales,” he explains. Although after the disappearance of OCON Sur, dismantled in September 2022, drug trafficking is not there to invest. “So much drugs are coming in that the big guys aren’t even interested in moving them. The price is on the floor. Now it sells for just a third of what it used to. It’s not worth risking it,” points out the civil guard.
Miguel has invested all the money that the Administration has had to return to him in building a modern chalet from which he speaks in a point in the province that he prefers not to reveal. It is his “secure retirement,” in which he has spent a portion of the “six-figure-plus” amount that he prefers not to disclose for the eight years without getting paid. Added to that is the fight over extra pay and unrecognized complements, his last loose fringe. He now swears that his only plan is to enjoy the years that he hasn’t been able to be with his family and friends. He visits some of them frequently in Morocco. “Look, this is from last summer,” he explains while showing on his cell phone a photo of a recreational boat in which someone can be seen from the back. Who is it? “Better that you don’t know,” he responds with a half smile.
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