"Tierra de lanchas": Narco-communal bonds and narco-fascination(s) between Moroccan and Spanish Hashish youths (1962–2019)

1. Introduction

The economic weight of global narcotrafficking, along with the forging of its routes, and its socio-cultural perception in national or transnational platforms have shown that these human networks in the Mediterranean have become a crucial part of southern-peripheral structures that have obvious impact on mainstream cultural creations. This rings especially true of platforms that are public or openly accessible through national Television and Youtube channels. This cultural circulation has led to a narco-fascination fever. which has complicated the process of representing these peripheral collectives that function in the midst of illicit practices and submerged economies, as well as the centric economies that benefit from them.

Today, these networks extend all the way from Galicia to the southern coast of Spain; to cities such as Cádiz, the region of Campo de Gibraltar, Málaga, Algeciras, Melilla and Ceuta, cities which are profoundly intertwined with and connected to Moroccan coastal cities such as Tetuan's Martil, Tangier or Nador, the closest Moroccan city to the Spanish enclave of Melilla. The constitution of these webs of narcotrafficking, which exist across (or throughout) the Mediterranean, first started with the smuggling of blonde American tobacco. During the fifties, Galician smugglers used to legally buy—American cigarettes from Sweden to have them delivered to Dakar. However, this only really took place on paper; the reality is that smugglers would actually divert the boats towards the Galician coasts, and the tobacco would never reach Africa. In 1983, tobacco contraband in Spain was valued at 600 millions of Pesetas, which is approximately thirty-six million Euros today.

Smoke would also circulate in and from Morocco towards the rest of the Peninsula, still under the Spanish Protectorate, within the webs formed by Juan March¹ "the original pirate of the Mediterranean," as categorized by Manuel Benavides in his 1934 book mostly based on the memoirs of Francisco Bastos, the not-corrupt head of La Compañía Arrendataria de Tabacos (until he was ceased in 1924 due to March's pressure). March then, later on, managed to get the CEO position of La Régie de Tabacs et Kif du Maroc which had the monopoly of both tobacco and Kif (Cannabis) in Morocco and Algeria, since then he became a contraband guru. The wars between Spain and Morocco during the colonial period in the early 20th century turned every Spanish or Moroccan soldier into a possible smoker of Juan March's tobacco, made and sent from the Moroccan and Algerian Regie to all corners of the Peninsula against La Arrendataria's will.

Juan March would restructure all contraband webs, and North-African hand-made tobacco would be illegally delivered in Gibraltar, Mallorca, Costa Brava, the shores of Cádiz, Portugal, and France. He motorized all of his boats, he created hierarchies between hand-delivery men up until the ones who drove the boats (carabineros). As Benavides puts it, "Él concebía el contrabando como un negocio en el que debería darse estos principios comunes a todos los negocios: cooperación capitalista, división del trabajo y plusvalía. Es decir, unos hombres que exponen el dinero, otros que exponen la vida y la libertad por un sueldo, y beneficios seguros" (51). After years, March finally got the monopoly of tobacco-making in both Morocco and Algeria, and more importantly, the control over las plazas de soberanía Ceuta and Melilla (crucial to his business), thanks to his relationship with Primo de Rivera.

This started in the early 1900s but it lasted throughout the Spanish civil war and the Second World War; and yet it is still the way in which actual narco-trafficking operates: remodeling March's initial contrabandistic design. In fact, Benavide already in 1934 stated that, "Hoy puede asegurarse que los sucesores de Juan Albert no hicieron más que imitarle. Albert fue un genio del contrabando. Bajo su dirección, los contrabandistas llegaron a defraudar cerca de cincuenta millones anuales de pesetas al Estado español" (51). Since then, these webs, which ultimately touched upon most of...