Madrid (EFE) containers that kept a total of 11,564 kilos of that narcotic substance.
Sources from the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office warn EFE of the significant increase in the introduction of cocaine into the country through the port of Valencia, the main commercial dock in the Mediterranean, seeing how the 9,356 kilos that entered in 2021 rose to 11,564 in 2022.
Ahead of Barcelona and Algeciras
This makes it the first port of entry for this drug in Spain, ahead of Barcelona and Algeciras (Cádiz), where there were 13 and 10 apprehensions, respectively, in 2022, according to calculations by this specialized Prosecutor’s Office.
This method of introducing drugs into the country is increasingly widespread among international organized crime, whose investigation is sometimes left in the hands of small mixed courts in the places where the seizure has taken place and which lack sufficient resources. to address this type of inquiry.
For this reason, the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office advocates centralizing this type of investigation in the National Court, although they are aware that to do so it would be necessary to reconsider the powers of this court, which is also currently collapsed due to the high number of complex cases of the ones that are in charge.
Another formula would be, according to the sources, the creation of courts and chambers specialized in the fight against organized crime in certain regions.
The sources highlight the importance of the change in the procedural model so that the investigation falls entirely on the Prosecutor’s Office and the magistrates are in charge of ensuring that the guarantees are respected in the procedure, although they understand that it is a project that has never been able to be implemented in Spain. , despite the announcements made by different governments.
Encrypted chats to make it difficult for the police
In addition to the international dimension that drug trafficking has adopted in recent years, there is also the use of advanced technologies to prevent the Security Forces from following its trail.
The use of encrypted chats such as Encrochat has become commonplace among drug traffickers and its dismantling by investigators has in turn provided a lot of information of interest in the cases open in Spain.
In total, according to the sources, the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office has 24 open procedures that have used data from Encrochat and 37 from Sky EC, where a billion messages have been intervened.
Most are investigations that were open and where data from these systems have been incorporated, although the judicial validation of these chats as evidence in a procedure will be important for its evolution.
For the moment, the Constitutional Court has already received two appeals from investigators who question the intervention of these chats, considering that they violate their fundamental rights, and in Germany a court in Berlin has raised a preliminary question to the Court of Justice of the Union Court (CJEU) to rule on its validity as evidence.