"The latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC] already states that not only are coca cultivation plantations increasing in some countries in Latin America, but traffickers are investing in innovation to modify the genetics of plants, in order to produce in greater quantity and with greater efficiency when transforming coca leaves into cocaine hydrochloride."
This is the analysis of the current situation in the global cocaine market carried out by Civil Guard commander Javier Valdenebro, an expert in the field. He is the architect of the launch of the GDIN (Global Drug Intelligence Network), a joint working team for the fight against drug trafficking globally by the judicial police of nine countries (Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Panama, and Dubai). The working headquarters of this organization is located in Madrid, at the Center for Anti-Drug Criminal Intelligence (CICA).
Valdenebro points out that the increase in the production of white lady in countries like Colombia or Peru has caused the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine in Spain to reach its lowest point in history. "In Spain, prices are lower than ever, as in the rest of Europe. Depending on the area of the country, but more or less, a kilo is around 14,500 euros," says this Spanish anti-narcotics agent. "The record seizure figures in 2023 [117 tons, double that of 2022], and what is expected to have occurred in 2024, are a consequence of the overproduction in the main producing countries."
This commander leading the GDIN explains that currently, the business is undergoing a significant change and that Spain has gained weight in the international cocaine market. Valdenebro explains that seizures in Spanish ports are decreasing, despite the fact that the largest seizure of this drug in the history of Spain, and one of the largest in Europe, occurred at the port of Algeciras in November 2024, when the National Police seized 13 tons of cocaine.
"There is much more trafficking taking place through vessels. This latest system, which began to gain more prominence from the second half of 2024, has meant that our country has a more significant role than in the past, as it opens up new possibilities for criminal organizations. The go-fast boats (high-speed semi-rigid vessels) allow the trafficking of a large amount of cocaine through a system that does not pass any filters, unlike what happens in ports and airports. Traffickers use vessels to collect the drug from great distances off the coast, hundreds of nautical miles, to vessels known as mothers, among which semi-submersibles are standing out. Additionally, they are also using fast boats for drop-offs - when the drug is buoyed and can only be located via GPS. In that context, the Guadalquivir River has become a very hot spot for drug traffickers."
Eight years ago, what is happening now was already predicted by the DEA. It was in 2017. In addition to collaborating with the Spanish police forces in several operations that dismantled powerful drug trafficking organizations in the country, the agents of the US anti-drug agency made a prediction that would prove to be highly accurate about the crisis of low prices that would reach Europe, mainly through the peninsula. The first alert was given on June 5, 2017, coinciding with a discreet forum organized by the Galician Foundation against Drug Trafficking.
This institution brought together high-ranking officials from the Civil Guard, the National Police, and the Customs Surveillance Service, members of the National Drug Plan, and judicial authorities, as well as two DEA agents, then attached to the US embassy in Madrid. One of them kicked off the meeting with the presentation International Geopolitics of Drug Trafficking, as detailed by this reporter and the journalist from La Voz de Galicia Javier Romero in Narco, SA (Deusto Publishing), a book that will be released on October 15 of this year, although it can already be reserved in the main shopping centers and bookstores in the country. Both authors delve into how Spain has become the epicenter of the cocaine business worldwide.
At that forum, the DEA accurately predicted that the incipient virus spreading through Colombia was just the first symptom of a disease with a high risk of spreading to the rest of the world. Their message did not disappoint. The DEA's warning that morning in June 2017 was based on official figures that quantified the problem and its growth potential: coca leaf plantations in Colombia were out of control. Just since September 2016, coinciding with the signing of the peace treaty after fifty-two years of guerrilla conflict, the hectares dedicated to this crop increased from 96,000 to 146,000. This increase affected 30 of the nation's 33 provinces.
By 2024, cultivation had expanded to 400,000 hectares. This explains, among other reasons, the current overproduction of cocaine in South America and the production capacity to feed historical routes and open new ones across the five continents. The most immediate consequence focused during 2017 on the laboratories that transform the leaves of this bush into the coveted white powder, known as cocaine hydrochloride.
For decades, Spain has positioned itself as one of the most important hubs in the international cocaine trafficking business. It has been years since the revolving door was located only in Galicia. The country's major ports, such as Algeciras, Valencia, or Barcelona, as well as the beaches and rivers in the south of the Peninsula, are now massive gateways for tons of cocaine that are consumed in Europe year after year or pass through the Old Continent on their way to Asia. At the beginning of 2025, cocaine was entering Spain by land, sea, and air. It is not an exaggeration. On July 23, the Civil Guard arrested a diver who was trying to extract 101 kilos of cocaine hidden in the hull of a ship that had arrived at the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria from Brazil.
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In 2017, the price of a kilo of cocaine in Galicia ranged between 26,000 and 32,000 euros. In Madrid, it reached 45,000, although it could also be bought for 33,000. Eight years later, in July 2025, a kilo brick of cocaine is sold for 14,500 euros, a historic low that is a harsh reality check for society, unprecedented.
But today, the wildest narco territory in Spain is in Seville. Never before have they seen so much white powder flowing wholesale in the Sevillian province or its neighboring areas, Huelva and Cadiz. After crossing the Atlantic aboard fishing boats, narco submarines, or sailboats, it arrives through the waters that separate Europe from Africa, and then navigates the last 100 navigable kilometers of the Guadalquivir River aboard boats that seem like lightning.
Colombian cartels have focused there where only hashish used to flow. But no matter how the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine is positioned in the market, what is curious is that the street price of a gram of cocaine has not changed for decades. Consumers continue to buy it by half a gram or whole grams. The price of a gram ranges from 50 to 60 euros, while half is usually set at 30, but it can also drop to 25. In many cases, this variation is due to the quality of the product. But only the dealer knows how much it was adulterated beforehand.
At the end of 2024, the Civil Guard discovered a stash of 7,000 kilos of cocaine hidden in two underground containers on a property in Coria del Río, a town in Seville on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. This area is very close to the home of several long-time drug traffickers, such as Ginés González, nicknamed "El Gordo," convicted of hashish trafficking and considered the river's patron saint, and Jaime González, nicknamed "El Manco de Bellavista." To hide the cocaine until it could be shipped, the traffickers had devised a plan: keep it underground in two large cargo containers embedded in a huge pit excavated with heavy machinery. To access the merchandise, the owners only had to remove a trapdoor and descend to the cellar via a ladder.
SOUTHERN DRUG TRAFFICKING, FROM HASHISH TO COCAINE
The operation took place in the early hours of December 27, 2024, when agents detected two loaded boats traveling up the Guadalquivir River. A broader surveillance operation was then deployed. Agents observed several people unloading a large quantity of bales and transporting them to a neighboring property. The warehouse—in drug slang, a warehouse for hiding drugs—was being watched by other individuals carrying long-range weapons, such as AK-47s. The operation was dubbed "Mirón." Three people were arrested and imprisoned. It was the largest shipment of this drug ever brought into the Guadalquivir River via drug boats.
Six months after that historic seizure, the Civil Guard arrested Ginés González and his brother Óscar, his right-hand man. They were staying at a luxury villa in Rincón de la Victoria (Málaga) with their respective families. The judge sent them to prison. The police investigation indicated that those 7,000 kilos of cocaine had reached Coria thanks to El Gordo's drug boats, which sailed upriver with the drugs until they ended up hidden underground.
But this seizure of 7,000 kilos of cocaine arriving on drug boats along the Guadalquivir was the third in the last two years in Andalusia. It confirmed the trend in the business that began five years earlier: smuggling cocaine through the south of the peninsula in boats that had previously only transported hashish. In November 2019, the Civil Guard seized a drug boat with 1,280 kilos of cocaine on board. The drug traffickers' boat was carrying only cocaine. Not a single gram of hashish.
The operation marked a milestone in the fight against drug trafficking: thanks to the seizure of this shipment, it was proven for the first time that Latin American cocaine traffickers had begun using the West African route to bring in their merchandise via boats departing from Morocco or leaving the peninsula for the high-seas transfer and then returning to the southern Spanish coast. They were flooding Europe with cocaine—and, thus, driving down prices—via the southern Spanish coasts.