For a fishing village with high unemployment, Barbate has a healthy sprinkling of fashionable clothes boutiques.
Abandoned fishing boats decay at the seaside, but many young people drive around in new cars or motorcycles and sport flashy gold chains.
Where the money comes from is an open secret. Only some 30km of water separate Barbate from Morocco, one of the world's main producers of hashish.
Barbate is far from being the only place in Spain where drug money is believed to boost the local economy.
"Our country is losing the fight against drug cartels," the daily El Mundo wrote recently. Spain has become one of the main hubs of the worldwide drug traffic, with more drugs reportedly passing through than ever before.
About 570 tonnes of hashish and 18 tonnes of cocaine were seized in Spain last year, more than in all other EU countries together.
It is estimated that 50 percent of the cocaine and 65 percent of the hashish consumed in Europe enters the continent via Spain.
Not surprisingly, Spain is also among the countries with proportionately the largest numbers of drug addicts. Some 24 percent of Spaniards have tried cannabis and 3 percent have taken cocaine, according to a 2001 survey.
Drug mafias earn more than 10 billion euros (US$12 billion) annually from drug sales and business activities in Spain, according to experts at the central bank.
Police believe a large part of the money is laundered in the British tax haven of Gibraltar and in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast.
Boutiques which sell luxury goods for throwaway prices in places such as Barbate are thought to serve the same purpose.
Spain's geographical proximity with Morocco and cultural links with Latin America have been decisive in turning the country into a gateway for drugs.
It only takes 1.5 hours for drug boats to cross over from Morocco to the Spanish coast near Barbate in the dark of the night.
Hashish cargoes are also smuggled over the Strait of Gibraltar in fishing vessels, boats transporting illegal immigrants, and lorries carrying vegetables or textiles.
Colombian cocaine traffickers also like Spain, where they speak the language and can easily cooperate with local drug lords.
About half of the cocaine that arrives in Spain lands in the northwestern region of Galicia, whose ragged coastline was popular among tobacco smugglers before the cocaine trade took over.
Critics say some local police, officials and prosecutors form part of the drug network in Galicia and on the southern coast.
Legendary Galician drug lord Laureano Oubina is even said to have once stormed into a police station, complaining that an expected drug cargo had failed to materialize.
Today, Galician drug clans such as the Oubinas and the Charlines are increasingly being replaced by Colombian drug rings and their even more ruthless methods.
Colombian professional killers can be hired in Spain for about 3,000 euros, according to police sources. They have murdered dozens of their compatriots, mainly in settlements of accounts between drug traffickers in Madrid and on the Costa del Sol.
Severed body parts of Europeans have also turned up in garbage containers. Drug traffickers can kill each other just for the sake of three or four kilograms of cocaine, the daily El Pais reported.
Some European experts have criticized Spain for inefficiency. Tens of thousands of people are detained for drug offences every year, but critics say police focus on street dealers and big bosses while allowing middle-level traffickers to escape.
"It is difficult to fight criminals who are constantly changing their routes and methods," a German police expert conceded. "Spanish police need to be as flexible as the criminals themselves."
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS