“Marcial, Marcial is the smartest.” This phrase became almost a commonplace in the Arousa estuary when reviewing the trajectory of the most famous Galician drug traffickers. He highlighted the abilities of Marcial Dorado Baúlde (Cambados, 1950) to direct his multiple illegal businesses, manage his assets, build bridges in all spheres and be as discreet as possible with the enormous fortune he accumulated, moving almost 70 million euros in the 90s, according to justice. “Marcial da Illa” (Martial of the Island) ended up, however, as the best known of all his cronies, even more so than he wanted to be Pablo Escobar’s Galician emulator, Sito Miñanco. Fame was given to him by his friendship of several years, from the mid-90s, with Alberto Núñez Feijóo, PP candidate for the presidency of the Government.
In a soccer simile, the campaign that is now ending began with a voiceover in the background that said something like “Martial, warm up, you’re going out.” It was evident that it was a matter of time before the leaders of the PSOE and Sumar, Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz, used the photos with Dorado against Feijóo despite the fact that, as he is in charge of underlining, they did not prevent him from obtaining an absolute majority in Galicia in 2016 and 2020, after its publication in El País on March 30, 2013. Parliament weeks after the then president of the Xunta took the opportunity to present himself as a victim, or that no candidate dared to display the images in the 2016 TVG debate, despite even carrying them in the folder.
Dorado was metaphorically brought out to play on the second Friday of the campaign by a Galician “coach”, Yolanda Díaz, at the Vigo rally, after Pedro Sánchez had only made a more than indirect allusion in the debate. The hashtags of
From the perspective of the right, the appearance of Dorado in the campaign is a sign of the desperation of the left, ready to crash against the usual rock. However, there is the question of whether the effects will be the same as in the past. In Galicia there were powerful social movements of total rejection against the drug lords. However, in at least part of the Galician territory, if not in the majority, the view towards drug trafficking and its tons of fresh money was not always one of repudiation. Nothing indicates that this vision exists in the whole of Spain, beyond specific places, such as the area of ??the Strait.
When the Caribbean route through Florida was closed to them, classic Colombian kingpins like Escobar and the Cali cartel created the “Mexican springboard” by partnering with experts in moving marijuana across the US border. There is also a “Galician trampoline.” Galicia, with its vast coastline outlined in its estuaries, the secular tradition of smuggling with Portugal and the pre-existing structures of clandestine tobacco import and distribution, became the gateway for Colombians to Europe. Thus, as seen in the Fariña series, there was so much cash in the estuaries that there was nowhere to put it. Boat pilots, smugglers or furtive shellfish collectors suddenly became multimillionaires, for placing Colombian coca on the soil of the Old Continent.
In the world before coca, that of tobacco smuggling, in that classic business of the estuaries, which was considered respectable, was where Marcial Dorado grew up. As the journalist Nacho Carretero recounts in his book Fariña, although he was born in Cambados, on the “continent” that would be said in the language of Illa de Arousa, it was on this island where the Dorado family settled. His mother worked for Vicente Otero Pérez, Terito, the big boss of the old school.
Terito, who was a delegate of the PP provincial congress of Pontevedra in 1990, days before Operation Nécora, had Marcial Dorado under his command, as a skilled boatman who brought the so-called “Winston de batea” onto the mainland, in reference to the wooden modules that are dotted in the Arousa estuary for mussel farming. In the 1980s, Dorado was already in charge of one of the three large organizations that controlled the illegal importation of tobacco in Galicia. “He headed the most powerful clan, the so-called Martial Band,” wrote Carretero, who, in the wake of Perfecto Conde’s pioneering book La conexión gallega, describes the operations to bring huge amounts of money to Switzerland, to the point that, he maintains, it could become the most powerful tobacco smuggling group in Europe.
“Tobacco is for the old, fariña is the future,” shouts the actor Javier Rey in the television series, in his interpretation of Sito Miñanco. After having been arrested on several occasions but evading justice and spending time, with the other bosses, in a sui generis exile in Portugal and beginning to appear in the press as a prominent boss, Dorado did not give up tobacco like Miñanco and company. It is one of the reasons why it is said that he was the smartest, since he would have been practically alone with this business. Although he maintains that he never got past that, in 2003 he was implicated in a case for the sale of a ship, the South Sea, which was used to unload more than five tons of cocaine. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison for that operation and bribing civil guards.
Although Carretero points out in his book that the debate in Arousa continues on whether Dorado managed to leave his tobacco niche, with the South Sea the myth was broken, since not only was he no longer invulnerable, but there is a final sentence that declares him a drug trafficker. Later, in 2015, the National Court imposed another six years on him for money laundering. The court considered “impossible” that he moved 69 million euros in the 90 only with the tobacco business.
The operation of the ship that led to the fall from grace of this drug trafficker led ten years later to the publication of the photographs on his yacht with Alberto Núñez Feijóo, which were found in a registry. As he himself acknowledged, the former president of the Xunta maintained a close friendship for several years with Marcial Dorado, which included trips to Cascais (Portugal), Andorra and Ibiza. But Feijóo always claimed to be unaware of his activities.
