Moroccan Drug Traffickers Employ Migrant ’Sherpas’ to Smuggle Hashish into Spain

The Sherpas or "black feet" mingle with migrants arriving from Morocco on the coast of Cadiz in makeshift boats in search of a better future. But their real goal is to cross the strait to introduce hashish into the area between Algeciras and Tarifa. This is the formula found by drug traffickers to circumvent the anti-drug police.

Recruited by the main drug traffickers operating between Morocco and Spain, these "parcel delivery men" of a different kind, estimated at around 150 men, walk through the mountains at night to unload the drugs in hideouts set up on hard-to-reach beaches, explains to Caso Abierto an anti-drug police officer. For this express run, the Sherpas earn between 1,500 and 2,000 euros per day.

The "Messi of hashish", one of the biggest traffickers in the Campo de Gibraltar, would be the designer of this new find. The Sherpas spend their day sleeping in apartments in the center of Algeciras, considered the territory of Messi. At night, they transport the drugs in backpacks "the size of a Glovo or Uber Eats delivery man" to the beaches of Cala Peral or Cala Botija, difficult to access by land.

The Sherpas, like "gazelles", quickly cover this route of about 15 kilometers that they know like the back of their hand. "It’s a complicated area. But they are able to climb, loaded with hashish, up to two kilometers uphill," confides a policeman who has chased more than one sherpa through these mountains of Cadiz. More than a hundred Sherpas have been arrested by the police in the last two years.