Operación Nécora
Encyclopedia
Operation Necora was a major Spanish police operation against drug traffickers in Galicia, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

. It led to the arrest of 54 people.

Background

The 1970s saw fishermen from declining fishing towns along the Galician coastline turn to the more lucrative occupation of importing contraband
Contraband
The word contraband, reported in English since 1529, from Medieval French contrebande "a smuggling," denotes any item which, relating to its nature, is illegal to be possessed or sold....

 cigarettes from the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

; At that time the sole manufacturer of cigarettes in Spain was Tabacalera
Tabacalera
Tabacalera is a Spanish tobacco monopoly which was established in 1636, making it the oldest tobacco company in the world . In 1999 the company merged with SEITA of France to form Altadis. Its brands included Ducados and Fortuna....

, a monopolistic state-owned company.

The topography of the arousan
Ría de Arosa
The Ría de Arosa is a ria, a saline estuary, that forms a firth situated on Galicia, Spain. It is one of the five Rías Baixas....

 coastline, with its coves and inlets, allowed these to bring in the contraband under the cover of darkness and from there distribute it throughout Spain. In the 1980s, the Medellín cartel
Medellín Cartel
The Medellín Cartel was an organized network of "drug suppliers and smugglers" originating in the city of Medellín, Colombia. The drug cartel operated in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Central America, the United States, as well as Canada and Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was founded and...

, under pressure from the US authorities and a saturated North American cocaine market turned to Europe, the smugglers utilized the methods developed in the previous decade to import hashish
Hashish
Hashish is a cannabis preparation composed of compressed stalked resin glands, called trichomes, collected from the unfertilized buds of the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredients but in higher concentrations than unsifted buds or leaves...

, and later cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...

 for the cartels. From the town of Vilagarcía de Arousa
Vilagarcía de Arousa
Vilagarcía de Arousa is a port town situated on the firth of Arousa in Galicia, 45km south of Santiago de Compostela. Vilagarcía has a population of almost 37,000 inhabitants, so it is the eighth largest town in Galicia....

 - the main distribution point for the smugglers - Colombian traffickers from Madrid would collect the drugs and distribute it throughout the rest of Spain.

Investigation

The investigation into the international trafficking of drugs through Galicia was prompted by a letter sent in August 1989 by Ricardo Portabales Rodríguez, a drug dealer serving a prison sentence, to Luciano Varela
Luciano Varela
Luciano Varela Castro is a senior Spanish Judge. He was born at and is married with four children.- Career :...

, an investigating magistrate of Pontevedra
Pontevedra (province)
Pontevedra is a province of Spain along the country's Atlantic coast in southwestern Europe. The province forms the southwestern part of the autonomous community of Galicia...

's provincial court. The inquisitorial system
Inquisitorial system
An inquisitorial system is a legal system where the court or a part of the court is actively involved in investigating the facts of the case, as opposed to an adversarial system where the role of the court is primarily that of an impartial referee between the prosecution and the defense...

 used in Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 civil law
Civil law (legal system)
Civil law is a legal system inspired by Roman law and whose primary feature is that laws are codified into collections, as compared to common law systems that gives great precedential weight to common law on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different...

 required further investigation by an investigating magistrate. Varela deemed the case to be too big for a provincial court to investigate so it was transferred to the Audiencia Nacional, Spain's highest criminal court. A 35 year-old magistrate in Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón Real is a Spanish jurist who served on Spain's central criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional. He was the examining magistrate of the Juzgado Central de Instrucción No...

 was charged with carrying out the investigation. The investigation was carried out with the assistance of Section IV of the Central Narcotics Department . Garzón used testimony from two informants known in the media as (The penitents): the aforementioned Ricardo Portabales Rodríguez and Manuel Fernández Padín, an actual member of one of the clans, to build the case against the traffickers.

Operation Mago

On the morning of June 12, 1990 a hundred vehicles containing 350 officers from the Central Narcotics Department, flown in specifically from Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

 to prevent any possible leaks from the local police force, left the main police station in the Galician capital, Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain.The city's Cathedral is the destination today, as it has been throughout history, of the important 9th century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James...

, heading for the comarca
Comarca
A comarca is a traditional region or local administrative division found in parts of Spain, Portugal, Panama, Nicaragua, and Brazil. The term is derived from the term marca, meaning a "march, mark", plus the prefix co- meaning "together, jointly".The comarca is known in Aragonese as redolada and...

of O Salnés
O Salnés
O Salnés is a comarca in the Galician Province of Pontevedra. The overall population of this local region is 107,618 .-Municipalities:...

. From there, each vehicle went on to their pre-assigned targets in different towns throughout the comarca. The operation was initially known as Operación Mago (Operation Magi
Biblical Magi
The Magi Greek: μάγοι, magoi), also referred to as the Wise Men, Kings, Astrologers, or Kings from the East, were a group of distinguished foreigners who were said to have visited Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh...

) - Garzón was told that they had named it after himself; however, he rejected this name and they settled on Operación Necora.

The base of operations was Vilagarcía de Arousa's police station, the former local party headquarters of the Falange
Falange
The Spanish Phalanx of the Assemblies of the National Syndicalist Offensive , known simply as the Falange, is the name assigned to several political movements and parties dating from the 1930s, most particularly the original fascist movement in Spain. The word means phalanx formation in Spanish....

. It was carried out under the judicial supervision of Baltsar Garzón, Luciano Varela and Javier Zaragoza, the deputy anti-drug prosecutor.

Trial

On September 6, 1990 the Anti-drug prosecutor presented an indictment against 49 of those arrested (Indictment 13/90). Of the remaining five, the prosecutor's office started a separate proceeding against three: Marcial Dorado Baúnde "Marcial de la Isla", Michel Haengi and Miguel Rivero González on the grounds of money-laundering - something that would delay the start of the main trial. Luis Falcon Pérez "Falconetti" and Tomás Leis Carlés were released on bail, however, they remained imprisoned on unrelated charges.
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