Former Spanish Undercover Agent Talks Of Pablo Escobar Encounter
Former undercover police officer Jose Manuel Caamano says he met Pablo Escobar at a luxury Casablanca mansion full of girls in bikinis, Colombian gangsters and cocaine and describes the drug lord as “bipolar”.
Spanish policeman Jose Manuel Caamano was working undercover in Spain and Morocco in the 1990’s having infiltrated ‘Los Charlines’, a drug-smuggling family based in the north-western Spanish region of Galicia.
He says he posed as an archaeologist who worked for Spain and the European Union on excavations on the Moroccan border with Algeria. His false position in the EU allowed him to ‘help’ the family of drug dealers to solve different logistical problems such as difficulties smuggling cargo through customs.
After gaining their trust, Caamano told Spanish newspaper El Mundo that he was taken to a luxury mansion in the south of Casablanca, Morocco, full of girls in bikinis, Colombian gangsters and cocaine in September 1992.
Caamano, who was 38 at the time, had told the Spanish drug traffickers that he had heard Moroccan gangs saying the Spaniards would have to pay double to have a cocaine shipment smuggled through the country.
The cocaine that they were intending to smuggle through Morocco belonged to Pablo Escobar so Caamano was taken to the Casablanca mansion to meet the Colombian drug lord.
Caamano says when he told Pablo Escobar the news, he answered “the merchandise is mine,” and he threatened “to shoot them up,” referring to the gang from Morocco.
Caamano says he talked Escobar out of his violent plan telling El Mundo: “I convinced him that it was more profitable to negotiate with Guinea, Namibia or Mauritania, where they would do the same for half the money. When he said that he planned to bring weapons by plane or get them here, I explained that in Morocco it was impossible to have weapons without attracting attention.”
Caamano says he advised Escobar on different issues related to drug trafficking and his relationships with the gangs in Morocco until finally, the Colombian trafficker asked him to work as his advisor.
Caamano told El Mundo: “I told him that I would think about it and that I had to tidy up my things. He told me to contact the Galicians if he accepted.”
Caamano believes that after Escobar escaped from La Catedral, the luxurious Colombian prison where he stayed as he avoided extradition to the United States, in July 1992, he took refuge in Morocco. Upon returning to Colombia, he died on 2nd December 1993 in a shootout with cops in Medellin.
The Spanish policeman described Escobar as a “bipolar” person and he claims that he could “go from kindness to threats and violence very easily”.
The now-retired cop lives in the southern Spanish city of Ceuta and has turned his experiences into a novel titled “Tea drinkers”.
He said the drug-trafficking scene now is very different from the days when he was active, saying: “Now the narcos live the Instagram era: they have to show off their wealth. They are violent and steal drugs from others if they need to. And before there was an ethical code between narcos and the police. All that is lost.”