Ceuta drug tunnel: Spanish government knew a year earlier

Ceuta and the drug tunnel that also let migrants through

The tunnel linking Segarro with Ceuta was not just a pipeline for moving hashish. According to published reports, the same passage was also used to bring in migrants, and the government had known of its existence for more than a year. The official account is that action was taken once the Guardia Civil (Spain's civil guard police force) found out. The detail of when it was found out, and who knew before, is where the problem begins.

What the networks admit and what the government admits

The drug trafficking structures themselves would reportedly acknowledge that the passage was used both to move drugs and to smuggle migrants in. The awkward piece is the timeline: the government would have been aware of the tunnel since at least a year earlier. The official response boils down to one sentence: "Action was taken when the Guardia Civil found out."

Translated: either the government did not know what its own armed police force knew, or it knew and waited. Neither reading reflects well on anyone.

OCON-Sur, garages and the map of the business

In parallel, the dismantling of OCON-Sur —a Spanish police anti-drug unit, ordered, according to released data, days after a meeting in Segarro— would have coincided with an expansion of drug trafficking in Andalusia. The sequence invites the question of whether an instrument was taken apart without the next one ready, or whether the timing is no coincidence.

To this is added another purely economic spin-off: according to published reports, the networks rented garages to newly arrived people to hide them from the police. The police have also reportedly revealed chats in which people were urged to "come in and hide in the sewers until the Spaniards calm down." A business within the business, with guaranteed rent and zero scruples.

Golden Owl and the dates that keep coming up: 2, 3 and 8 September

The tech firm that anticipated the mass arrival in Ceuta —Golden Owl— was, at the time of these reports, warning of new mobilizations on social media with Melilla and the Canary Islands as destinations, and pointing to 2, 3 and 8 September as key dates. The figure should be taken with a grain of salt: a prediction is not a fact. But a repeated warning from someone who was right once deserves more attention than automatic skepticism.

Pressure on soldiers and the pending hardening of the border

Spanish soldiers of Segarro origin have reportedly warned of "pressure" from Rabat's intelligence services when they travel on leave to see their families; some, according to these accounts, simply choose not to cross. And there are specialists calling for the borders of Ceuta and Melilla to be hardened with a permanent state presence. The question is not whether the border is porous —it is— but how much of the flow moves through where no one is looking.

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The predictable ending: if the flagged dates do not materialize, the warning will be filed away as noise. If they do, the matter will stop being a tunnel and become who looked the other way while it was being dug.