TO beginning of 2025the province of Toledo began to appear with unusual frequency in police reports. From then until a few hours ago, the escalation of violence and crime that has been splashed across the country’s newspapers has made one thing crystal clear: the dangerous conversion of many towns in Spain such as hub of criminal gangs.
From local clans to industrial cultivation. In March, the National Police dismantled a network of indoor marijuana crops spread across several municipalities (Illescas, El Viso de San Juan, Yeles, Lucillos and Ugena) managed by a family clan with the structure of a criminal group. The investigations began following anomalies detected by an electrical company that warned of illegal connections to the network.
Upon entering the homes, the agents they found more than 5,800 plants, 3,600 cuttings, firearms such as assault rifles and cash. The simultaneous records revealed complex logistics and a high level of specialization: germination rooms, differentiated cultivation cycles and distribution to other networks that exported production outside of Spain.
The mafia. That operation, framed in the National Plan against cannabis trafficking, confirmed what the authorities they already sensed: Toledo, due to its proximity to Madrid, was establishing itself as a preferred area for marijuana mafias, with warehouses and homes transformed into agricultural laboratories at the service of European drug trafficking.
In fact, counted A few weeks later, the newspaper El País reported that the organizations, in a twist, were looking for empty apartments on social networks or even they consulted the obituaries to squat the houses.
Fuensalida: the violent mutation. Three months later, the violence moved from the field of cultivation to that of theft and intimidation. In June, the Civil Guard dismantled the Ángel CM gang, a group of criminals that for months spread fear in Fuensalida and other towns in La Sagra. Based in a neighborhood nicknamed “the Bronx,” its leader organized assaults serial attacks on vulnerable people, vehicle thefts, falsification of license plates and thefts from shops and warehouses.
Not only that. They acted with brutality: Victims were dragged or hit during the pulling, and some elderly people suffered fractures and serious injuries. The Civil Guard and the Local Police managed to arrest nine people (all residents of Fuensalida) after weeks of surveillance and chases in broad daylight.
Toledo as a hub. In one of those chases, an accomplice fled cross-country after stealing a car. The arrest of Ángel and his collaborators brought relief to the area, but it also showed that Toledo was no longer just home to cultivation networks, but also crime groups organized with its own structures and hierarchies, capable of operating between several provinces.
The international leap. After the summer, the National Police dismantled in Yuncos, Palomeque and Méntrida an organization that represented a qualitative leap: a drug trafficking network with direct links with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.
Sixteen people were arrested, including a chemist from the cartel itself who had traveled from Mexico to direct production of cocaine and methamphetamine.
Clandestine laboratories. The agents located two camouflaged laboratories in rural areas, equipped with industrial materials, chemical reagents and security systems designed to hide the activity. More than 160 kilos of drugs were seized, including cocaine, base, ephedrine and methamphetamine, along with 7,500 liters of precursors and 21,000 euros in cash. Fifteen of those arrested were placed in provisional prison.
The operation confirmed that Toledo had ceased to be just a logistical territory: it had become a production and refining enclave of high-value drugs, which implied the arrival of foreign technicians, international financing and a level of sophistication unprecedented in the region.
A shooting as a turning point. On November 9, the municipality of El Casar de Escalona (barely two thousand inhabitants) was the scene of a shooting between agents of the Special Operations Group (GEO) and a group of drug traffickers of Dominican origin. The suspects, from Asturias, they planned to kidnap to members of another local network to settle a drug debt. When intercepted by the Police, they opened fire and the geos responded.
One of the alleged drug traffickers died on the spot and two others were injured. No officers were hurt, but vehicles were riddled by gunfire. The operation, directed by Udyco, revealed the existence of groups dedicated to violent debt collection between gangs, a phenomenon typical of urban drug trafficking environments transferred to rural Spain.
The drift. The shooting also coincided with another armed confrontation in Seville, where a police officer was seriously injured by an assault rifle during a hashish raid. Both episodes led police unions to demand more media and bulletproof vests in the face of the “qualitative leap” in crime, which no longer hesitates to confront with weapons of war.
Toledo as a mirror of a phenomenon. The Ministry of the Interior he responded remembering the budget reinforcement and the purchase of new ballistic equipment, while the anti-drug prosecutor of the National Court, Rosa Ana Morán, warned of the risk that Spain would follow the path of Belgium and the Netherlands, where drug trafficking networks have derived in shootings, threats to judges and institutional corruption.
If you like, Toledo, converted into marijuana laboratoryenclave methamphetamine and scene of reckoningsymbolizes that dangerous transition: from a quiet province to the epicenter of globalized crime that mixes Latin American drug trafficking, local crime and European infrastructure. A geography that reflects the displacement of organized crime towards the interior of the peninsula and the birth of a new silent frontier in the heart of Castilla-La Mancha.
Image | Civil Guard
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