Spain’s Police Play High-Stakes Hide-and-Seek With Smugglers on Northwest Coast

Three motorboats lie stranded like beached whales on the jetty, their outboard engines smashed and their markings gently fading in the setting sun.

For Spain’s customs police, conducting a frustrating campaign against tobacco and drug smugglers, the stricken boats are prized booty in a game of hide-and-seek played on the high seas and in the craggy inlets of northwest Spain’s Galicia region.

Using 2,000-horsepower launches, teams of customs officers stalk smugglers who by night travel in high-speed boats between cargo ships lurking over the horizon and drop points where consignments of cigarettes and hashish can be picked up by onshore accomplices.

Some local residents believe many smugglers are now using their formidable distribution networks for cocaine trafficking, attracted by the prospect of huge financial returns. However, officials say there is no evidence for this.

Galicia, a region of farmers and fishermen bordering northern Portugal, has been home to smuggling for centuries.

In the 1940s, penicillin, which was in scarce supply in Spain, was brought illicitly into the country from across the border.

In more recent times, tobacco smuggling has thrived in defiance of a state monopoly. It meets the insatiable local demand for American cigarettes.

Hunting smugglers can be a hazardous business in isolated communities where inhabitants regard handling contraband as a legitimate activity.

Customs police who recently pounced on a launch moored on the mist-shrouded island of Arosa had to beat a hasty retreat when they were greeted by a hail of stones by hundreds of islanders who quickly massed along the shore.

“When we carry out these operations, we tend to do it in the early morning and get it over very quickly,” said Javier Soriano, a customs official. “Otherwise, we may end up having to confront 200 or 300 people.”

The smuggling barons, many of them from humble backgrounds, are widely admired in many villages as “men of the people” who have turned the tables on their former social superiors.

Rich smugglers have also tried to win the hearts of their less successful neighbors with acts of generosity.

“People here see that smuggling gives many people a livelihood, so they have no desire to report it to the police,” said a police captain who asked not to be named.

The most spectacular confrontations with the authorities are at sea, where the customs police, whose launches can quickly accelerate to speeds of up to 55 knots, frequently engage in frantic chases with the smugglers.

The favored technique is to steal up behind the smugglers’ boats and try to ram their outboard engines. Police spend every night combing the islands, inlets and floating oyster farms that dot the coast.

A customs officer died in June while in full pursuit of smugglers when the launch he was piloting crashed into a batea , as the oyster farms are called.

Some local inhabitants are convinced that tobacco smuggling is no longer profitable and that cocaine trafficking offers the most lucrative alternative.

“Cocaine has been entering here for the past two years. Everybody knows this. I think they bring it in separately from the tobacco,” said Jose Sito Vazquez, a former Socialist mayor of the island of Arosa, a smugglers’ haunt inhabited by fishermen off the Galician coast.

Local officials deny that Galicia is being used as a staging post for cocaine traffic between Colombia and Europe.

“The coastal smuggling method is very risky and is not suitable for cocaine trafficking,” said Manuel Lopez Prado, a government official in Pontevedra.

Despite frequent seizures of cigarettes and hashish, not a single significant haul of cocaine has been found in the region.

“If large amounts of cocaine were being smuggled into the region, the police would sooner or later stumble on some of it,” said a customs officer, who asked not to be named.