The Spanish cop, 20 million euros and 13 tonnes of cocaine

He was known to his colleagues as a quiet, polite man, dedicated to his job of investigating money laundering. And there was certainly nothing flashy about Chief Inspector Óscar Sánchez Gil, head of Spain's Economic and Tax Crimes Unit (UDEF), said Oscar Lopez-Fonseca and Patricia Peiró in El País (Madrid). He didn't wear ostentatious watches or drive fast cars. Since joining the police force in 2007, he'd won medals for outstanding work and, before heading up the UDEF, had been given a senior role investigating drugs and organised crime.

So no one could quite believe it when, this month, police raided the home not far from Madrid that he shared with his wife, also a police officer, and found €20 million stashed away in neat packs of €200 or €500 bills inside the walls of the house, in its cupboards and in the garden. Further millions were later discovered hidden in his office in Madrid and his beach cabin in Alicante. He and his wife, along with at least 15 others, have now been arrested for drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and membership in a criminal organisation.

Spain is a strategic point of entry for drugs into Europe, said Eva Vilà of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (Geneva). In 2021, a then-record 303 tonnes of cocaine were seized by EU member states, 75% of it found by Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. And within a year, the amount seized by Spanish police had doubled. Most of it arrives hidden in shipping containers transporting legal goods. This month saw Spain's biggest drugs bust ever, said The Gibraltar Chronicle, when police in Algeciras seized an incredible 13 tonnes of cocaine stashed in a consignment of bananas from Ecuador – the new nerve centre of drug trafficking in Latin America.

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To put 13,000 kilos of cocaine in a container, drug lords must have blind faith customs aren't going to open it, said Cruz Morcillo in ABC (Madrid). That's where Sánchez came in. He was not a paid employee of the traffickers, he was their "partner", and used his position to colonise investigations that could hurt them. Whenever police planned to intercept containers at Spanish ports, he'd decide which ones were to be opened and which left alone. But he'd been under suspicion for almost a year, and the bust in Algeciras seems to have been the trigger for his arrest.

Alas, this isn't an isolated case, said Alberto Galone on El Cierre Digital (Madrid). The parallels between his case and previous officer arrests suggest he is "the tip of the iceberg" in a network of corruption. That 148 Spanish police officers were convicted of drug corruption between 2011 and 2020 shows the tentacles of the cartels have penetrated to the "very core of state security", said El Mundo (Madrid). Public confidence in law enforcement agencies is shot. Winning it back will require an institutional reaction equal to the formidable challenge posed by these cartels.