Snow on the Atlantic: How Cocaine Came to Europe
At the beginning of Alfred W. McCoy’s seminal work on the global heroin trade and the CIA, The Politics of Heroin, he gives us a simple formulation that’s useful for any study of illicit drugs and their trade: ‘Narcotics are not simply illegal and immoral,’ he writes. ‘They are the source of extraordinary profits and power.’ Part of the power of McCoy’s book is that he writes about his subject so thoughtfully, and eschews the sensationalism that characterizes too much writing about drugs and their traffic. ‘Simply put, narcotics are major global commodities that resist any attempt at localized suppression… As long as demand for drugs in the cities of the First World continues to grow, Third World producers will find a way to supply their markets.’
Nacho Carretero’s Snow on The Atlantic, How Cocaine Came to Europe, published in a translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2018 by Zed Books, is a contribution to telling the story of one of these global commodities: cocaine. It tells a tale of Galicia and its Costa Del Morte, that region in Spain sitting on top of Portugal with 930 deadly miles of coastline and an adventurous history of shipwrecks and pirates and smuggling. This book focuses on the colorful tale of how Galicia became the port for cocaine smuggling in Europe, largely through an alliance between the Medellín Cartel in Colombia and a homegrown smuggling culture and network of clans. It’s packed with characters and schemes and police operations, but one flaw is that it falls into their sensationalism too often (a popular television series in Spain was based on the book), and its major failing is in not making much of an attempt to analyze the phenomenon more deeply. The details in the book, however, make great raw material for a more developed analysis down the line.
Here is a sketch of the story that Carretero tells: it begins in earnest after the Spanish Civil War, in that inter-border region between Spain and Portugal called the Couto Mixto. Carretero goes as far as to say the area is characterized by a ‘statelessness.’ Not so long ago, as recently as the nineteenth century, if you asked villagers in the area what country they were citizens of they couldn’t tell you. The Spanish Civil War defined these borders. And those borders made nations become as classes; the living standard in Portugal was high, while in Spanish Galicia much of the rural inhabitants lived in relative and real poverty. It was the difference, Carretero writes, ‘between one group of people who were starving, and another enjoying the spoils of African colonies.’ This was something I wish Carretero had expanded on: what was the licit economy in Galicia and why did its people live worse? On that he gives no real answer, though he does describe how some local fortunes were made from tungsten sold to the Third Reich during the Second World War.
Whatever the reasons for this poverty, the relative affluence of Portugal right across the border made Galicia a prime location for smuggling of all sorts of things. It was cigarettes which became the big money maker. Smugglers cut deals with the big guys like Reynolds & Philip Morris in America to move excess production and faulty batches, dodging gargantuan amounts of taxes, and altering the flow of goods from up from Portugal to across the Atlantic. That route would define the traffic later when cocaine started coming from Colombia.
The law helped too. Until 1982 all you could get for smuggling was a caution. Before 1978 smuggling was only an economic offence. With the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA) enforcing the weak laws, smugglers rarely went to jail – at most they’d get a fine, and that would often be lost in the Minoan bureaucratic system of the new democratic state post-Franco.
Carretero describes a society where the lumpen ruled each class strata, not just a lumpen-proletariat but a lumpen-petty bourgeois and a lumpen bourgeoisie. ‘There was nothing abnormal about the sight of smugglers and guardias sharing a tumbler of wine over a game of dominos in the local tavern.’ He explains further that smugglers and police would often have agreements that let the smuggling pass unmolested, provided the police got their cut: ‘From the beginning, the relationship with the Guardia Civil was good. Those in the pay of the government were as hard up as everyone else, and it was almost always them who proposed the pacts.’
Police in on the take isn’t unprecedented or uncommon. More interesting are the connections Carretero details between the smugglers and the political class. When I mention smugglers, I’m referring not just to the later drug traffickers but also the ‘smoke lords’ who developed their expertise and reputation moving cigarettes. They provided the perfect resource for the cartels to exploit later when they saw the talent and culture that existed in Galicia. These mafia-like clans were generous contributors to all political parties in the region, particularly the institutional right-wing parties like the People’s Alliance (AP), which later became the Partido Popular (PP). That party had numerous links to the smugglers, from campaign contributions to friendships, to particularly salient connections through the Galician Chamber of Commerce, of which many smugglers and their associates were members at one time or another. That extended to the auxiliaries of the narcotics trade – lawyers like Pablo Vioque who defended the smugglers in their inevitable run-ins with the law.
How the shift to drug smuggling was made is murky. Someone bought hashish once from Africa and knew one of the Capos. Hashish smuggling quickly became cocaine.
However it happened, smugglers made the transition quickly. When the Medellín cartel spent some time in Galicia in exile they realized that there was an ideal infrastructure for them to use. They built this trade from the ready-made scaffolding of the tobacco trade. Clan bosses like Sito Miñanco took the speedboats they had running crates of smoke up and down the Arousa river and loaded them with blow.
The Medellín cartel had come to Galica because they were feeling some heat from the DEA in bringing drugs into the U.S. (never if it went at cross measures with the goals of the CIA, of course, as McCoy shows in his book), and they needed new markets. McCoy’s law of narcotics as commodities seeking to be sold held true. Europe in the 80s was the perfect logical next step. Not only did they have the skilled talent they needed, but the Galicians spoke their language. And the government tied its own hands to stop it thanks to their numerous corrupt connections.
This is the more interesting story that I wish the book had told, as well as delving deeper into the politics of the trade. Why did Galician politicians allow the smuggling culture to take hold? Carretero mentions that a factor in the government finally taking action was the support for interdiction of the trade by Socialist Party (PSOE) politicians, like Felipe González, who was Prime Minister of the country from 1982-1996. It was within this time period that the first blow against the smugglers came, with the ‘macro-indictment’ of 1984. This was the first coordinated strike against the whole of the smugglers and their network, rather than limited and ineffective isolated enforcement. Carretero credits the limited success of this action (nobody went down hard, though it did create a new state of affairs where the smugglers had to tread more cautiously and not so out in the open as they had before) to it having the support of a Virginio Fuentes. Fuentes was the socialist governor of Pontevedra, ‘one of the few in Galician politics to raise his voice against the smugglers.’ Carretero attributes this to Fuentes following the cue of González; he ‘sensed a potential vote-winner in taking a stand against smuggling.’
But Carretero also mentions a murkier story that would have merited closer scrutiny (or more realistically its own book). He relates an anecdote from Fernando Rodríguez Mondragón’s book El hijo del ‘Ajedrecista’ (The ‘Chess Player's’ Son). That chess player was Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, who was the boss of the Cali cartel – the cartel that shipped the cocaine over the Atlantic to Galicia. Orejuela was in Spain following a crackdown in Colombia by the President Belisario Betancur on the narcos, but he had been scooped up in November of ‘84 in Spain along with an account book of his detailing millions of dollars in transactions for the cartel. The DEA wanted Orejuela extradited to America, but after two years of jockeying and negotiation, Orejuela and the Colombians were sent back to Colombia. They spent just months in prison before getting out, while in America they could have expected 10-15-year prison sentences.
Mondragón says in his book that the reason for these reduced sentences came to Spain on Pablo Escobar’s private jet. And there were twenty million of these reasons. $5 million went to Felipe González, ‘his negotiators said there was an election coming up and they needed the money.’ $10 million went to the Audiencia Nacional, ‘the High Court in Spain with jurisdiction over international crimes.’ Carretero doesn’t dig any deeper into these explosive allegations, wrapping up tersely that ‘these claims remain unsubstantiated.’ But having questions like these answered would go a long way in understanding how exactly the drug trade was tolerated by the Spanish government.
McCoy notes that ‘the CIA’s Cold War alliances with drug lords ... created enforcement-free zones closed to outside investigation.’ How this worked was simple, ‘the DEA deferred to the CIA during the Cold War whenever covert operations became intertwined in the drug trade…’ Its links to the Medellín cartel, which Pablo Escobar founded, are documented as well. ‘All major U.S. agencies,’ writes McCoy, ‘have gone on the record stating, with varying degrees of frankness, that the Medellín cartel used contra forces to smuggle cocaine into the United States.’
The fact that Mondragón’s accusation points at González’s Socialist Party isn’t insignificant. U.S. intelligence had precedent in cooperating with socialist parties in Europe – they viewed them as a crucial tool in stopping Communist Parties from coming to power. In France they were essential in accomplishing this goal. In the port city of Marseille they used the Socialist mayor Gaston Defferre to break striking workers organised by the Communist led Confédération générale du travail (CGT) union (a still powerful union today, the second largest in France, they were at the height of their power postwar), and aided a purge of the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) police units of communists. Created after the war, the CRS were meant to be a civilian police force (in France the Gendarmerie is a branch of the military), and as a result their ranks early on had a significant communist presence. That was quickly rectified though. Deferre gave a list of communists in the police units to the Socialist government minister Jules Moch, who had them fired. Then, the freshly purged CRS units attacked the striking workers. These were strikes that the CIA saw as a harbinger of an imminent Communist coup, so the stakes were high. Whatever the collateral damage might be the operation was a primary goal of theirs. The effect of breaking communist power in the city also weakened anti-trafficking measures. It was the communist CRS units that had been leading the fight against the smuggling of the Corsican milieu which was powerful in the city. With effective opposition to them extinguished, they were able to broker an informal alliance with ministers within the Gaullist government to manufacture and export from Marseille provided they kept France drug free. They largely kept their promise and, according to the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, produced 80% of the US’ heroin supply.
I don’t know enough of Spanish political culture and deep politics to know if a similar dynamic was at play in Spain – Carretero feints at these connections too much and never develops them, but as I mentioned above the signposts he’s given could be valuable for a deeper look.
What is certain is that much of the Gallican economy today was built on the primitive accumulation of the smuggling trade – first from tobacco smuggling, then from the cocaine traffic. For a very long time the boundaries between the criminals and established business were very thin. ‘Nobody liked to miss out on the Capos’ soirees: not police officers, not politicians. They even had parties in the Vilagarcía Chamber of Commerce.’ So well established were these organisations that one powerful clan, led by Sito Miñanco, had a PR man. He was the journalist Pedro Galindo Guerra, who worked for the Televisión Española, the state-owned broadcaster. The operation was ‘a well-oiled machine, running on the all-important fuel of social acceptance.’ Miñanco had a plaque put up in his honor in Cambados by the mayor Santiago Tirado (PP). It went up to the highest levels of the regional government too. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the current president of the Regional Council of Galicia, was pictured on the tobacco and suspected drug smuggler Marcial Dorado’s yacht. Feijóo at one time was talked about as a successor to Mariano Rajoy, the Prime Minister at the time Carretero’s book was written, at the top of the PP.
Dorado’s fortune extends further than the yacht. He ran 28 companies. He had a portfolio of 208 premises. He owned a factory, petrol stations, a vineyard (the largest in Portugal), he got into the olive oil trade in Morocco. All that dirty money set lots of labour into motion. If you look him up on Google now he’s described as a ‘Spanish Entrepreneur.’
In the city of Vilagarcía, the SVA found 100 dummy businesses used for laundering money in 2010 – this extended to ‘legitimate’ businesses too. ‘The amount of drug money that has been – and is being – invested is incalculable. Hundreds of now-legal enterprises – from cafes to discos to shops – first opened on the back of proceeds from some consignment [of drugs] or other.’ A 1997 study found that 80% of hotels in Arousa belonged to drug traffickers. In reality, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of those in licit and illicit trade.
Carretero has presented an eclectic cast of characters who have no shortage of high-octane adventure stories to tell, and in one sense these are all remarkable figures. But are they so much of an exception? The analysis of some of the unknown heavyweights a journalist he quotes near the end of the book clarifies the phenomenon of the drug trade best: ‘They’re businessmen, they keep their noses clean. The fact they delegate lots of responsibility makes it pretty much impossible to link them to any operations.’ At the end of the day drugs are a commodity, and they need businessmen to sell them.
Snow on the Atlantic: How Cocaine Came to Europe
Nacho Carretero
Zed Books, 2018
9781786993021