Catalonia is the major marijuana production center in Europe. It's grown in abandoned farmhouses in Les Garrigues, in the forests of Pallars, in abandoned industrial buildings in the Barcelona metropolitan area, and in houses built on the outskirts of many towns in La Selva. "In Vidreres and Maçanet, there are housing developments where every other house has a cannabis plantation inside," explain the police. However, despite Catalonia becoming the continent's main supplier, marijuana is now also arriving from abroad. The Spanish Tax Agency has seized 1,214 kilos of marijuana from Thailand and Canada at El Prat Airport and the Port of Barcelona. However, this figure doesn't include the 467 kilos that entered through the Port of Huelva and another 642 kilos that Canadian police seized at the Port of Montreal, which were also headed for Barcelona. This amounts to more than two tons of drugs seized in seven operations over the last six months.

In 2023, the police detected an increase in thefts of the same car model, an Asian sports car. The following year, reports of theft of this type of vehicle rose to 137 in Catalonia alone, and at the beginning of this year, 118 more were already registered. The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) realized that the interest in this specific model and the disappearance of passenger cars was no coincidence. And this Wednesday, the Catalan security force and the Customs Surveillance Service of the Catalan Tax Agency explained that the whole thing was organized by a group that stole vehicles throughout the country, and also in Aragon, Andalusia, and France, and sent them hidden in large scrap containers to make them difficult to detect. The destination? Gambia.

He's a veteran stevedore at the Port of Barcelona. He didn't maintain a high standard of living, nor did he pretend to be better than he was. When he learned the delivery hadn't gone well, he decided to go into hiding. He did so in a hotel in the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona. The police entered his house and didn't find him. They did find an arsenal: two brass knuckles, a stun gun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a big-game rifle, a 9mm sporting handgun, a .22-caliber rifle, and an air pistol. They eventually located him the next day, walking down the street, and arrested him.

A dog persistently sniffs a shipping container filled with sacks of cocoa. A Civil Guard officer guides it while Customs Surveillance officers examine it. The container comes from Ecuador, and the objective is to find a bag of hidden cocaine. The 70-kilogram sacks are stacked on top of each other, without pallets, making surveillance even more difficult. Everything must be done by hand. The dog doesn't bark or sit: for now, it's clean. At another terminal in the port, Customs Surveillance officers open the doors of another container. It's a quick gesture, but it happens slowly. "This one is quite likely carrying drugs," they warn. It comes from Brazil, and there are a multitude of boxes of sewing thread. They climb in, search, open, but only thread and more thread appear. They touch the boxes with some kind of marker. It's called cocatest. Also a negative woman.

Typically, in a police investigation, drugs end up leading to weapons. That is, first a marijuana plantation or a shipment of hashish is usually detected, and then the police end up discovering that the traffickers are armed, not so much to attack the police, which is very rare, but to defend themselves against robberies (known as narco-assaults or drug robberies). rollovers) that they suffer at the hands of other criminal groups. An investigation by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) has changed this order of factors and has become one of the first operations by the Catalan police against arms trafficking in Catalonia. As sources within the force admit: the weapons ended up leading to the drugs.