He appeared without a lawyer and the magistrates of the Provincial Court have had no choice but to suspend the macro-trial that this Monday was to sit on the bench of the Provincial Court a clan with family ties accused of growing marijuana in two houses in Cubillos del Sil and one from San Miguel de las Dueñas to later traffic the drug. The Ponferrada area Prosecutor’s Office requests up to 15 years in prison for the alleged leader of the clan, accused of a crime against public health of substances that do not cause serious harm, another of fraud of electricity and another of illegal possession of weapons, and between four and ten years in jail for the rest of the gang members. The lack of a lawyer for one of the 15 defendants now delays the oral hearing that was to be held in the Court on two consecutive days in view of the high number of defendants in the largest case in memory against marijuana trafficking in El Bierzo.
The defendants, many of them with criminal records, must also pay up to 30,443 euros to the company UFD Naturgy for the defrauded electricity as well as their prison sentences. And it is that the high electrical consumption of the facilities where marijuana was supposedly cultivated in two unsanitary houses fitted out in Cubillos del Sil and in another house in San Miguel de las Dueñas (Congosto), is always in these cases one of the clues that lead to the Civil Guard to dismantle the marijuana plantations.
The Prosecutor’s Office has highlighted in its qualifications how the clan that allegedly cultivated and trafficked marijuana was highly hierarchical, to the point that those members who were not part of the family circle bordered on situations of servitude when they dedicated themselves to the “most thankless tasks”. » Surveillance of the plantations, irrigation, fertilization, cutting and harvesting of the plants.
These members in the lowest part of the clan’s scale, called ‘lacayos’ or ‘lacorros’ in the jargon of marijuana cultivation, also lived in the same houses where the plantations were located in conditions “of great hardship” because they were ” poorly conditioned for the daily life» of the people, when adapting to the cultivation of the drug.
The Civil Guard dismantled the house in San Miguel de las Dueñas in June 2020, within the so-called Operation Watio. There, 410 plants were seized and the first four members of the clan were arrested, who quickly moved the plants and equipment they had in the two houses in Cubillos to the Órbigo area, until they were also arrested in October.
