Meanwhile, in Spanish Law Enforcement news... Two notes of irony: 1 - He rejoined them, and you're not meant to be a Civil Guard with a criminal record. 2 - The Civil Guard is apparently nicknamed "Reputable".
Personal politics aside (Big proponent of ending prohibition) if having a criminal record would bar someone from being a guardia civil then he certainly shouldn't have been allowed back
Exactly. Regardless of prohibition rules, when you're talking about a law enforcement officer, you don't get to choose to break laws! Criminally prosecute him for having the 817 kilos of hash! (It's Spain, pretty sure Multiple Jeopardy rules like in the US don't apply)
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/17/spiders-blamed-after-broken-si.html Spiders: Somehow the least skin-crawling and creepy thing about this one.
Third note of irony: the strange part is that he was trafficking with drugs *while on leave*. The boys in green usually do their drug trafficking while on uniform. I-i-i-i mean isolated cases. Totes isolated unrelated cases. Nothing to see here. They would never engage in ilegal activities ever, they have the cleanest criminal record of all the States Security Forces. The civil guard would be a joke if they weren't, you know, an armed police force with a military structure and a history of being violent assholes.
Growing up in Cuba it was interesting to note that whenever there were complaints of corruption or abuse in the history books about colonial times it was never the tercios or the regular police, always the guardia civil. Hell, even after colonial times. Two of my great uncles were killed by a guardia civil because they had a disagreement over who had won a controversia (kinda like a Cuban country rap battle)
Fixed for historical reasons... "A buenas horas mangas verdes" (good timing, you green sleeves!) is an expression create because the Guardia Civil has always had a green uniform and used to get late to... duty. As in reaching the place where the robberies had taken place long after the bandoleros had left XD
Organised crime involving law enforcement is fascinating. Especially when you look at stuff like the post-soviet satellite states. The whole thing where the Bulgarian smuggling gangs were all 100% controlled by the secret police and then when the wall came down a lot of these secret police guys just... got other law enforcement jobs while controlling these groups smuggling vast amounts of drugs, arms and people into Europe. It's just mad!
There's a great old Polish movie about this kind of stuff: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105185/ Basically a story how ex-secret police officers had to find their place in new, "democratic" country. And in Poland it's almost a cult classic.
Today we've been hit by the side-effects from the big hurricane. I was walking up the street to the bank. There was a bit of a breeze but that was it. Suddenly the windspeed triples and the rain was like a colossal bucket of water being emptied over the town. Across the street from me, as I walked, roof tiles were flying down to the pavement. So, maybe houses weren't being lifted up and sent off to Oz, but it's certainly not something I'm used to.
I knew what it was before I clicked the link. Also, is there any ex-Soviet-satellite country without a mass corruption problem related to former secret police/intelligence services? If so, let me know, I'd love to see how they got around it.
That is a physical impossibility. Communism, much like the ghost pepper, breaks things on the way in AND on the way out.
The Baltic states are doing pretty well in that regard I think, Estonia was 22nd in the world for corruption in 2016, and Estonia wasn't that bad either (Russia was 131 on the list fyi)
