Cocaine Smugglers Blow Past Europe’s Law Enforcement with Speedboats and Tech

MARBELLA, Spain—On a rainy winter evening, an inflatable police boat approached an imposing 60-foot, four-engine vessel suspected of ferrying drug smugglers.

Two seized drugboats being held at the Customs Service docks in the port of Algeciras, Cádiz, Spain.Rather than try to flee, the larger speedboat began circling the inflatable, taunting the four Civil Guard officers aboard. Onshore, an audience cheered the drug boat. Olé! Olé, they yelled, as if spectators at a bullfight. Bro, kill them.

The drug boat then smashed into the Civil Guard vessel, flying over the top and crushing the crew. It circled back and struck the officers who had been knocked overboard. Two were killed.

The high-profile attack showcased the reach, power and impunity of an international drug trade that delivers cocaine from South American producers to European buyers in historically unmatched quantity, quality and price. In the two years since, the market has only grown, alongside the challenge to Spanish authorities.

Global cocaine production is at a historic peak, driven by global demand, expansive coca cultivation and a well-oiled supply chain. Cartels ship the drug from ports in Ecuador or Brazil to West Africa and on to Europe, now the world’s second-largest cocaine market behind the U.S.

Spain’s beachside paradise of Costa del Sol has become one of the most trafficked ports of entry.

Seafaring drug smugglers hold the advantage over antidrug forces, using drones, radar and thermal imaging to avoid detection and high-powered speedboats to outrun authorities, according to traffickers, law-enforcement officials and lawyers dealing with organized crime in Spain.

“You can’t allow hundreds of drug traffickers’ boats to roam around a port or a bay in plain sight, or to offload their cargo while families with children are swimming nearby,” said Juan Luján, head of Spanish police’s organized-crime unit on the Costa del Sol. Yet, Spain’s security forces have effectively ceded control of its waters, he said.

Spanish authorities acknowledge they are underequipped to intercept hundreds of illegal drug boats operating in the Strait of Gibraltar between southern Spain and Morocco. The souped-up, fiberglass smuggling vessels, known locally as narcolanchas, compare with fast-assault vessels used by the U.S. Navy SEALs.

They can reach 60 knots, about 70 miles an hour, creating high danger during attempted interceptions by the few law enforcement vessels that can keep pace. The speedboats carry as much as four tons of cocaine and are designed to skip over rough waves at high speed. Smugglers use them as weapons when chased.

These vessels are illegal in Spain, and possession risks a five-year prison sentence. Even buying 100-liter jerrycans of diesel fuel is now a crime, presumed to be used to power a drug boat.

Gangs build the illegal boats in clandestine workshops in Portugal and smuggle them into Spain via truck or river. A former drug boat pilot said a vessel’s four-man crew might idle in international waters for as long as a month. The crew shelter under umbrellas and fish for food while waiting to retrieve cocaine cargo jettisoned from freighters and semi-submersibles, known as narco subs.

“This is an established system of trafficking,” said Ruggero Scatturo, senior analyst with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. “We are talking about experienced seafarers, with skills and high salaries.”

Long beaches provide ample opportunities for smugglers to offload their cargo. “I live next to the beach, so I see them pass by here,” said Francisca María Gómez Pantoja, the mother of one of the civil guards killed in the drug boat attack. “The speedboats enter whenever they want. They drop off the drugs and leave.”

Another entry point is the 400-mile Guadalquivir River, a labyrinthine waterway of channels and inlets. The deserted farmland shore is dotted with warehouses ideal for hiding contraband, according to Lisardo Capote, head of the customs surveillance service in Campo de Gibraltar, some 50 miles down the coast from the river.

“We can see them,” Capote said. “The problem is stopping them.”

Out of a fleet of at most three dozen patrol boats available to Spanish law enforcement agencies in the south, fewer than 10 can match the speed of a drug boat. Armed officers are allowed to shoot only if drug traffickers fire first.

The Journal joined a recent night patrol with a customs boat along the southern coast and into the Guadalquivir River. María Orellana, the vessel’s captain, said drug traffickers frequently pass at sea and wave to her and her crew. “They don’t fear authorities,” she said.

Orellana recalled chasing a drug boat that turned and threatened to ram her vessel. “I told them, guys, they are going to kill us,” she said, and ordered her crew to retreat.

As a measure of Spain’s growing role in the cocaine trade, the amount of the drug seized in the country doubled in 2023 from the prior year, to around 117 tons. In 2024, the most recent tally, Spain seized more cocaine than Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany combined, according to the EU’s drug agency—countries that are home to the three largest ports on the continent.

In May, the Spanish Civil Guard confiscated more than 30 tons of cocaine off the Canary Islands, the largest seizure ever made, anywhere in the world. The shipment had arrived from South America via Sierra Leone, where Dutch drug kingpin Jos Leijdekkers runs an international cocaine network.

Yet even such record seizures make up only a fraction of total drug traffic. Profits outweigh any lost shipments, given the amount of cocaine successfully smuggled to Europe, according to traffickers and law-enforcement officials. The money is so good that gangs previously inclined to warring against each other instead collaborate in the global supply chain, sharing the smuggling work, a trafficker in Marbella said.

The record amounts of cocaine now produced in South America have pushed down wholesale prices worldwide. In Spain, a kilo of the drug sells for as little as $15,000, compared with $35,000 two years ago and as much as $45,000 before the pandemic. Retail prices have remained around $70 a gram, but the quality is purer than ever because of the glut: So much cocaine is arriving that traffickers don’t have time to dilute it, experts said.

Coming in and coming in and coming in, the Marbella trafficker said of the smuggling volume.

The drug boats have widened the drug smuggling pipeline. A European gang importing cocaine through shipping containers to the port of Algeciras pays a 21% freight fee on the cargo to traffickers moving the product. The fee for speedboats is 12%, the Marbella trafficker said.

Cocaine being transferred to a speedboat in the Strait of Gibraltar in a video obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Spanish gangs operate many of the speedboats moving shipments north to Spain in the Strait of Gibraltar. For a fee, depending on weight, they provide a vessel, crew and temporary storage before the drug moves deeper into Spain and the rest of Europe.

Building a drug boat with four 400-horsepower engines and radar equipment to track law enforcement costs more than $500,000. Pilots usually get paid around $350,000 for each trip. Such expenses add up to petty cash compared with the value of a 3-ton cocaine shipment, which can yield more than $250 million in retail sales.

By comparison, Spain has allocated less than $230 million over the past decade for its Campo de Gibraltar security plan, launched to dismantle criminal networks in the south of Spain.

“There is no money to sustain chasing these people,” said Scatturo, the analyst.

Spain’s resort city of Marbella has been a center for international organized crime since the 1960s. Gen. Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator at the time, encouraged cartels to spend their money there, turning a blind eye to the peaceful spending of ill-gotten gains, as long as there was no violence.

Today, “you won’t find another place with such variety, so many nationalities and so many cartels,” said Luján, the police commander. Superyachts and designer boutiques line the marina. At night, queues snake around the block outside nightclubs where DJ’s spin thumping house music for big-spending revelers, their faces sculpted by surgery and tanned by the sun.

Wealthy tourists and business people make Marbella attractive for criminals who can spend their illicit fortunes alongside the legitimately wealthy without drawing attention, said Ricardo Alvarez-Ossorio, a defense lawyer who represents accused drug traffickers in the area.

At a rooftop bar, Alvarez-Ossorio picked at a plate of roasted potatoes topped with beluga caviar and gold leaves, describing how the number of his cases involving cocaine has increased at least fivefold in the past two years. The Strait of Gibraltar has for decades been a gateway for tobacco and hashish trafficking, he said, but nothing compares with the ballooning cocaine trade, which has drawn organized crime syndicates from other countries.

Foreign gangs arriving in Marbella have imported their violent methods from home, including gunfights with rivals as well as authorities, Alvarez-Ossorio said. “Before, it was impossible to remotely imagine they would shoot at police.”

If police encounter Serbian or Mexican traffickers, the lawyer said, the criminals won’t stop. “They will go all the way,” he said.

Traffickers launder money in Marbella real estate, nightclubs, gyms and businesses, masking their owners through shell companies abroad, said a law enforcement officer with expertise in money laundering. They buy avocado harvests and other crops from farmers, and sell them on to supermarkets. Gang members seek lottery winners to buy their ticket in exchange for the prize amount plus tens of thousands of dollars in cash. The gang then deposits the ticket winnings into bank accounts.

If the black-market economy was eradicated, the officer said, Marbella would collapse overnight.

The cocaine profits spread beyond the city. Drug traffickers have long recruited young people from La Línea de la Concepción, a coastal town of 65,000 people about 45 miles from Marbella. It has one of Spain’s lowest household incomes and highest unemployment rates, around 30%.

The traffickers offer thousands of euros for an afternoon’s work toting drug shipments or keeping watch, said Óscar Camacho, a longtime police officer and union representative in Marbella. They also provide so-called narco welfare, similar to the money and gifts from cartel leaders in Colombia and Mexico, largess intended to buy loyalty and silence.

Locals say Marbella houses the big-time drug dealers, and La Línea supplies the prisoners—referring to the underlings who most risk arrest.

“If people there have no job opportunities, if there’s no investment to create jobs, people have to make a living somehow,” Camacho said. “In the end, who feeds them? The narcos.”

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com