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More than 1,000 agents from Spain’s Civil Guard have been deployed into the olive groves of Jaén to help mon­i­tor the har­vest.

The fed­eral police force is Spain’s old­est law enforce­ment agency and inves­ti­gates crimes in rural areas. The agents will be posted at local olive mills and olive receiv­ing posts.

Catalina Madueño, the fed­eral government’s sub-del­e­gate in Jaén, announced last week that the 1,150 agents would ​“improve secu­rity lev­els in rural areas and improve the sub­jec­tive sense of secu­rity.”

“To achieve this, the work of the Civil Guard and also of the National Police will focus on the effec­tive­ness of the fight against a very spe­cific type of crime, pro­mot­ing the pres­ence of agents in rural areas and con­tin­u­ing to con­sol­i­date the level of col­lab­o­ra­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion achieved with all the actors involved in the agri­cul­tural cam­paign,” she added.

The deci­sion to deploy fed­eral agents into the olive groves comes on the back of a report pub­lished in May, which said that 121,000 kilo­grams of olives were stolen dur­ing the 2020 olive har­vest.

This fig­ure, which rep­re­sented a 35-per­cent increase in olive thefts com­pared to the 2019 har­vest, sur­prised some in the region since olive thefts had been trend­ing down­ward.

In 2019, Madueño also deployed more than 1,000 fed­eral police in Jaén to patrol the region’s olive groves on foot, on horse­back and in heli­copters.

At the time, she said about 25 per­cent of olive thefts involved steal­ing har­vested olives that were left in the groves wait­ing to be trans­ported to the mills.

Fortunately for some grow­ers last year, 31,000 kilo­grams of olives were recov­ered and 50 peo­ple were arrested in con­nec­tion with the thefts.

• Agro Popular
• La Contra de Jaén
• La Contra de Jaén