The Costa del Sol, with its epicenter located in the city of Marbella, is the southern gateway for drug entry into Europe and a true hub where mafias from all over the world converge, to the point that police forces acknowledge their inferiority compared to organizations that move hundreds of millions and have practically no limits. L'ARA wanted to get a close look at the impact of the drug business on the Andalusian coast with two major reports, one focused on Marbella and another, to be published tomorrow, on Barbate. Marbella has been synonymous with luxury and glamour, but also corruption, for many decades. Barbate, on the other hand, represents the other side of the coin, that of old fishing villages where poverty has driven many young people towards drug trafficking, who are nothing more than pawns of international cartels.

Driving through it, from the access roads to the main avenues, Marbella has the quality of being a city that could be many other cities. Better said, any other overcrowded city on the Costa Dorada, Costa Brava, French Riviera, or the Costa del Sol itself, of which it is an emblem. The tallest buildings are hotels and not offices, the apartment blocks, also imposing, have communal swimming pools, and the mountains on the horizon are full of white dots; buildings that have destroyed the natural landscape. But if you venture onto the roads that wind through the mountains, you see they are not chalets or old houses: there are many mansions, complexes, tennis clubs, and exclusive golf courses. The health crossing signs are accompanied by signs that say Arzt and Apotheke, not doctor or pharmacy. The billboards are in English and advertise private clinics, mostly for aesthetic tweaks, to treat low fertility or hair loss, aimed at an older demographic who do not want to - or at least want to hide - getting older.

"Tell whoever sent you that next time I will cut his throat." The "next time" the three hitmen lodged about fifty bullets into Catherine Isabelle Castagna and her husband, Jacques René Grangeon. The Lyon clan did not like Castagna's threat and they gunned down the couple in their luxurious villa in the Las Lomas de Marbella urbanization. 50 bullets for the 500 million pesetas that Castagna and Grangeon owed them for losing a hashish game. One bullet for every 10 million (60,000 euros). The Lyonnais clan had recently settled a few months ago on the Costa del Sol to control the route between Morocco and France and they were not messing around. It was the autumn of 1996.