The confiscation of the assets of the Galician drug trafficker Marcial Dorado, decided by the Justice in 2016, has become the longest trial and the one that includes the most valuable assets in the last 20 years in Galicia. The auctions of the lots announced by the National Anti-Drug Plan (PNSD) are taking place slowly, even if some properties have been acquired through direct sales. In the latter case, the buyers include public institutions. First it was the municipality of Vilagarcía de Arousa (Pontevedra) and now that of A Illa de Arousa (Pontevedra), the municipality where Dorado was born and lives his retirement after spending nine years in prison.
The Municipality of A Illa has just acquired two pieces of land on which it plans to build 70 publicly promoted houses and a green area. But the next target of the mayor, the socialist Luis Arosa, is the villa for which the famous trafficker continues to fight in court and whose valuation at the date of the seizure exceeded three million euros. “The day when I will have to leave that house, which belongs to the State, is closer and then we will see how to pay for it”, anticipates the councilor.
The villa of Marcial Dorado, 75, which behind closed doors is one of the most flashy built by tobacco smuggling bosses in the 1970s, is a small example of the sum seized from drug traffickers, valued at 21.4 million euros and registered to 19 Spanish and nine foreign companies. Spread across several provinces, it is a large inventory of properties, farms, commercial premises, petrol stations, car parks or activities that emerged after a long investigation. The investigations also made it possible to identify 16 accounts in Switzerland of companies localized by the Revenue Agency in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
The mayor announced that his idea is to transform the house into a senior center and reserve part of the facilities to expand sports equipment for the younger generations. “The judicial rubber on this property cannot be stretched any further and as mayor I have put all my effort into defending the proposal that this house benefit the citizens of the Municipality, from the elderly to the young, because I believe it is right,” explains Arosa.
The councilor explained that he will shortly resume with the PNSD delegate, Francisca Sureda, the commitment already begun with his predecessor in office, Joan Ramón Villalbí. Villalbí, the mayor says, promised that, when the time came, the property would not be put up for auction so that the Municipality of A Illa could bid to buy it. “It won’t be cheap, but I know we will have every advantage possible to acquire it, and if I stay here, it will be owned by the islanders,” he says.
Arosa, who has been in local politics for ten years, including two as mayor leading a bipartite government with the BNG, is negotiating the acquisition of another 4,000-meter rural plot that appears in the inventory of confiscated assets in Dorado. His idea is to also use it as a green area given the building restrictions presented by the municipality’s urban plan. In a few days the purchase of the two lands, already closed, for which the Municipality will pay 361,000 euros, will be signed in front of a notary. The investment is already included in the 2025 municipal budgets with a seven-year payment plan.
In December 2010, the Municipality of Vilanova de Arousa was the first to submit a bid for part of the drug dealers’ inheritance. He took over the 17th century Vista Real manor, confiscated from the Los Charlines clan and for which he paid 1,085,000 euros. In 2018, one of the emblematic properties owned by Dorado was withdrawn from public auction to be purchased by the Municipality of Vilagarcía for 174,000 euros. The building, which is part of the city’s historical catalog, will become a social center once the Xunta approves the renovation project. The local government also plans to take over parking of private management which belongs to this property and which has not yet been auctioned.
The ruin of Dorado
In 2011 the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence that sentenced Dorado to 10 years in prison and a 35 million euro fine for drug trafficking. The sentence opened the doors to the largest seizure of assets and money from a Galician drug trafficker and was decisive because five years later he lost his last legal battle. He was firmly convicted of money laundering in 2016, but all of his confiscated assets were not sold until November 2024.
The National Court attributed to Dorado an important position in drug trafficking which he has always denied. Proof of this is the 204 properties purchased through a network of companies and the money seized from bank accounts in Switzerland, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Belize, Liechtenstein, Portugal or the Bahamas. “It is true that Marcial Dorado was a tobacco smuggler (…), even at a popular level he was known as the ‘tobacco king’, but this does not mean that he did not engage in drug trafficking, trying to justify something like a smuggler’s ethic, a statement that does not go well with his firm conviction for this crime”, read the sentence that convicted him of money laundering.
On the bench, Dorado argued that the empire he built since the 1970s and the corporate network he created to launder, the largest ever uncovered against a Galician drug trafficker, were the result of profits made in duty free of airports, an argument that did not convince the judges. In February 2017, the National Court granted him his first detention permit after his release had been rejected 24 times. The Prosecutor’s Office opposed it, complaining of social alarm and possible violation of the sentence. It was the first step towards obtaining the third prison sentence which he received in July 2020, two months before serving three quarters of his last sentence which expired in 2025.
At the end of the 1990s, Dorado was the last to abandon the tobacco trade that had brought him so much money and power and which always kept him under the control of customs. The most discreet of cigar makers has been unable to avoid the headlines that have followed him since a Swiss judge investigated his links to drug trafficking. His arrest in 2003 for cocaine trafficking was the biggest setback in his long prison career. He received a 10-year sentence from which he is still trying to defend himself with the testimony of a key witness and a lawsuit against the investigating judge. The publication in 2013 in EL PAÍS of some photos taken in the mid-nineties which revealed his friendship with the then number two of the Department of Health and then president of the Xunta, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, current president of the People’s Party, was, according to Dorado, “his personal ruin and his judicial burden”.
In 2017, the central prison supervisory judge agreed in an order that Dorado met one of the main requirements for release from prison: repentance. In a document signed by the prisoner during his court appearance, he states: “I regret everything that happened and that I was in a bad place at a certain time” (…), “they were events that happened due to a series of circumstances that could not now happen again”.
