Home > Drugs and politics: how Rafael Louzán played his opponent

Drugs and politics: how Rafael Louzán played his opponent

by libertavigo - Open-Publishing - Friday 4 April 2014

Being Europe’s premier gateway for drugs, Spain has no shortage of shady characters. The biggest one has been in the game for so long, he knows how to remain in the background – always around, but never in the limelight.

Rafael Louzan
Rafael Louzan

His name is Rafael Louzán, president of the north-western region of Pontevedra, part of Galicia. With its stony Atlantic shoreline, this traditionally poor area relies on the fishing trade – and whatever else its inhabitants can drag in from the sea. This includes drug hauls from South America that are reloaded from larger vessels out at sea and brought to land along the Pontevedra coast, or directly into the harbor or Vilagarcía de Arousa, a long-standing favourite for Colombian drug cartels.

Louzán has been the political behemoth of this, his home region, since around 1995. Since then, the coastal fishing villages have enjoyed curious growth spurs – young men with no education all of a sudden were able to build large villas with security walls and guards, drive expensive cars and open snazzy restaurants. All this, as the locals will tell any curious visitor, was built with money from drug and tobacco smuggling as well as money laundering. Indeed, some of the restaurants are used more for laundering than for dining.

The 46-year-old never appeared to question the wealth of his region, let alone do anything to curb its reputation as an entry point for drugs to Europe. Instead, he sought to divert the limelight of the anti-drug fighters in Spain to party comrade in Spain’s main Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, while continuing his loyalty to Spain’s prime minister and old friend, Mariano Rojoy.

Pictures of Feijóo, president of Galicia, surfaced last year in the national press, showing him with known drug trafficker Marcial Dorado on a boat, apparently on holidays, in 1995. It is unclear why these images resurfaced 18 years after the event, but regional newspaper Novas Da Galizia reports the release of the images was orchestrated by Xesús Palmou Lorenzo, the justice councillor in Galicia for the Popular Party, judge José Antonio Vázquez Taín, and the chief of the Customs Vigilance Service (SVA) in Galicia, Hermelino Alonso Eiras. These three men are close allies of Louzán.

While Palmou and Taín both had political ambitions, Alonso had first-rate contacts to the illicit traders in the region. Manuel Gulias “o Barbas”, a tobacco trafficker, was an acquaintance to whom Alonso leaked information about ongoing investigations against the traffickers in exchange for money and data to facilitate the arrest of other traffickers. Among his other sources were Manuel Oubiña Fariña “O Rubio” and Eugenio Prado Bugallo, the brother of José Ramón Prado Bugallo “Sito Miñanco” who was sentenced to three years of jail in 2000 for money laundering linked to drug trafficking.

Alonso used his connections to get ahead in the SVA and to build considerable personal wealth from extorting money from the Galician drug traffickers. Louzán, in the meantime, is also known to have considerable connections to the local cartels and is protected by their barons. Together, Alonso and Louzán played party politics against Feijóo. Never mind that, officially, Feijóo and Louzán are colleagues and friends, Louzán has political ambitions and may be after Feijóo’s job. The presidential of Galicia would be one step up for the local politician – and one step closer to the premiership. Why else were these ancient pictures leaked to the press, while other images, showing Louzán’s friend Rajoy with trafficker Vicente Otero, never appeared? Louzán, press sources say, exerted pressure through the all-mighty Popular Party to leave those images in the editors’ drawers.

The connections of drugs and politics are deeply ingrained in Spanish politics. Louzán is the puppet-master, who will play the drugs card against political opponents, while leaving his own shady connections safely out of the limelight.

Portfolio