Unveiling Criminals’ Motivations: Media Exposure and Identity Among Traffickers

Afternoon of February 6, 2018. A score of hooded men assaulted the Línea de la Concepción hospital (Cádiz) to forcibly release an individual who was in police custody and who had been arrested after skipping a control.

He wasn’t just any criminal. It was about Samuel Crespo. The lieutenant of the Alarcón brothers, Antonio and Francisco —known as Isco—, the leaders of the Los Castaña clan. Two guys who, like the Messi of Hashish, Kiko el Fuerte or Pantoja, were unknown outside the Campo de Gibraltar region, but who in municipalities like El Linense or Algeciras had become idols for young people seduced by their brand-name clothes , luxury cars and, above all, for the respect and fear that they inflicted on all those who knew that they were the kings of drug trafficking in southern Europe.

A distorted image that was eating away at a society plagued by unemployment and lack of opportunities and that peeked dangerously into the abyss of a Mexicanization driven by the ascendancy of the drug trafficker..

The civil guard Guillermo Alonso was preparing to go on vacation that summer when his mobile phone rang. It was a call on behalf of General Contreras, in which they explained to him that they were going to propose a project that would change his life and mark the final stretch of his career: lead the communication of an unprecedented device against drug trafficking. It was the OCON Sur Plan. A deployment that for five years would relentlessly percussion the large drug clans to end their impunity, but which also had the purpose of eliminating the aura that surrounded these criminals.

Alonso, in the reserve since June, recalls that information was from the beginning a key factor in an action plan supported by four legs and whose other three were the Rapid Action Group (GAR), the Operations Unit and the Regional Center of Analysis and Intelligence against Drug Trafficking (Crain).

His work consisted of “counting the work of others”, but also “sizing up a problem that we were going to solve” and demonstrating the strength of the Rule of Law. The task was not easy.

As the spokesman for the platform For your safety, for everyone’s, Francisco Mena, commented, a kind of omertà had been installed in the region that began to break, little by little, after the death of a six-year-old boy who was losing his life after being run over by an inflatable boat.

It occurred three months after the assault on the La Línea hospital and reaffirmed the fears of some residents who in July 2018 attended the death, during a persecution, of the agent of the Customs Surveillance Service José Luis Domínguez Iborra.

“There was an awakening of some citizens who understood that this scourge affects you. We are talking about families with children, who study in schools and who see in the figure of the adolescent captured by the drug traffickers a boy who earns a lot of money and who has everything within his reach,” Mena said to warn of the deep roots among the youth of a culture of drug trafficking that has a great “pull effect”.

It is not a new phenomenon. Our protagonist’s first contact with La Línea dates back to 1990, shortly before the outbreak of the Gulf War.. In his memory, images that are fully valid today: “The civil guards intervened to take the cardboard and the people crowded around in the patrol cars to recover them”. Guillermo spent several months in the region intermittently, but it helped him get closer to a reality that would end up becoming a habit.

The first thing he did when he agreed to be the media face of OCON was to present an ambitious communication plan that he ended up agreeing on with those responsible for the device. One of the goals was for the agents to understand the value of communication in that war that they were waging against drug trafficking.

“It was not logical that we were making 30 or 40 records, the media would call to ask and tell them that nothing was happening. That generated mistrust,” he explains, before adding that his colleagues understood that the information that was transmitted to society was a weapon with which to reaffirm authority: “Transfer the effort that was being made to improve the situation”.

In this effort to reach the public there were several milestones that exposed the activities of organized crime and highlighted its weakness in the face of a country’s defense mechanisms.

One of them was the first major operation against Los Castaña. A whole exhibition of public force in which more than 600 civil guards were mobilized. The same one that was perceived in another intervention that took the agents to the Chafarinas Islands to end one of the points where the narco boats took refuge when there was a storm.

“It was like saying to them: ‘We are going to go to where you are,” says the former press officer, who recalls that an ocean-going ship, helicopters and planes were used. Although the before and after, mediatically speaking, was the discovery of Villa Narco.

A kind of urbanization in the El Zabal neighborhood of Línea that over the years was the place of residence of numerous traffickers. The authentic value of the images that Guillermo recorded in that residential complex transcended the police. It showed all those people who could look with some admiration at those criminals who “were not Robin Hood” and “lived off the hook”.

In each of the houses that were bursting, they found a mixture of “opulence” and “bad taste” that delved into the essence of drug trafficking.. “One of the chalets had each room themed. Another built a diving board in the pool that was like a galleon and a mountain on which animals like a crocodile were carved.”

“In the basement of a villa we found stuffed animal heads that were hanging on the wall as if they were hunting trophies.. One of a moose, of a bear, of a lion… It seemed so strange to me that I thought they could hide something, so I asked one of the colleagues who was searching the room to open one while I was recording it.. There was nothing inside. They just thought that decoration was beautiful”, recalls.

Other times, more than with the image, the impact was achieved with a sound. That of the screams of the agents when breaking down a door in the middle of the morning or the noise of the engines of high-end cars intervened.

It was one of the reasons why he began to get involved with the GAR at the moment of greatest tension: when you have to break into a house and reduce the suspects.. He admits that at first he found reluctance, although he ended up gaining the trust of the members of the unit.

The sound of money

But nothing as intoxicating as that constant surround sound of the ticket counting machines.. It is recorded in the brain like the chorus of a song. Like the one issued by the ones that were used to count the 16.5 million euros that they located in various homes in La Línea.

The agents needed approximately 10 hours and several machines to count the bundles that they found hidden anywhere in the buildings.

We have dismantled the structure of a criminal organization that controlled the maritime traffic of cocaine in containers originating in South America and entering Europe through the port of Algeciras.

More than 16.5 million euros have been seized. pic.twitter.com/Xowg93VrGh

– Civil Guard (@guardiacivil) June 10, 2021

“My main fear was not being able to reflect so many months of work by the researchers, not knowing how to sell the product,” Alonso confesses.. “I was looking for a record that was visually appealing. An isolated house, better than a block of flats; the figure of the leader; some striking seizure…”, aware of the difficulty of finding elements that would prevent them from becoming monotonous for the media.

But one thing is clear, the autonomy it enjoyed had a red line that could never be crossed: “Disseminate images that uncover operational tactics or investigative techniques”. Which caused me to have to change my habits over time.

“At first, since most of the operations were at dawn, I stayed in a hotel from which I traveled to one of the points of interest. But there came a time when they recognized me at a gas station or in a bar where I drank coffee.

So my presence could be associated with an imminent intervention and give clues to the bad guys, so I had to start going directly from Seville or sleep in another municipality outside the radius of action of the traffickers. The early mornings of all these years remain for me”.

‘Narco stars’

This information task caused a curious phenomenon. Although the Civil Guard does not show the faces of its detainees, successive investigations made society “put a face on drug trafficking”.

They managed to make the activities of many of them transcend the region and a media exposure that damaged the image of many for whom discretion was key. Others, however, when they saw themselves before a squad of cameras, experienced it as “a kind of recognition”.

Alonso recalls the case of “a well-known narco from La Línea” who, after arresting and searching his house, was offered to hide his face because there were means outside.. He refused and went out looking, defiantly, at the targets that captured his walk to the police car.

“We think he did it because in this way he marked his status in prison,” he says.. Similar is the story of another investigated who in jail asked to be called with the nickname that the agents had given him during the investigation: “And it was not pretty at all“.

For some of these criminals, “going out in the press was a show of strength and power”, a way of empowering themselves before other clans. The nicknames were like company brands that measured the true strength of the organization.

Guillermo Alonso, once the OCON Plan was restructured, in a controversial decision by the Ministry of the Interior, looks back and is proud of the work they did in Algeciras, La Línea or Marbella.

“He did not run the risk of corrupting the system,” but it was necessary to “stop” the drug trafficker. They did it with perseverance and determination, but also with a mobile phone and an image stabilizer that captured the dimension of the problem and recorded the fight that is still going on.