"When I get on a boat, the first thing I do is check who the skipper is." This is the phrase that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, pronounced in Congress this morning in allusion - without mentioning it explicitly - to the image that was disseminated in 2013 of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado to board a yacht
The spokesperson for the Executive, Isabel Rodríguez, already referred to this photograph last Monday. Some statements that Feijóo attributed to the "desperation and decomposition" of the Sánchez cabinet, whom he accused of wanting to "change the conversation" in the face of the controversy over the Mediator case.
Dorado, convicted of drug trafficking in 2009 and money laundering in 2015, was a toothache for Feijóo. In 2013, El País published some photographs of the two together taken during the summer of 1995, when the current popular president was the general secretary of the Galician Health Service. At the time of the dissemination of the images, Feijóo was the president of the Xunta de Galicia.
The Galician drug trafficker was born in 1950 in Cambados, in the Arousa estuary (Pontevedra). Before being arrested in 2003 for cocaine smuggling, he had made several trips and excursions (in Ibiza, Portugal, the Picos de Europa...) with Feijóo during the 1990s. When the images were published, the former president of the Xunta denied a relationship of friendship with Dorado (he would say the opposite years later) and stressed that he was unaware of his criminal record, that he had already been arrested on different occasions for tobacco trafficking. "Do you think that if I knew what he was going to be accused of, I would let myself take photos or go to eat with him?" Said the leader of the PP in the Salvados program, on La Sexta, in 2018.
The images of Feijóo and Dorado navigating the Vigo estuary called into question the credibility of the popular leader, who had to respond to speculation and defend himself against requests for resignation made by opposition parties. He affirmed, then, that he had cut relations with the drug trafficker in 1997 (they only coincided - he assured - at the funeral of a mutual friend, Manuel Cruz, in 1999), similar to what Dorado explained, who revealed that the last trip had been the 1998.
However, the investigating judge in the case that ordered Dorado's arrest, José Antonio Vázquez Taín, revealed in statements to El Mundo that Dorado and Feijóo had had telephone conversations between 2001 and 2003, which contradicted Feijóo's version. He specified, yes, that they were not considered criminal in any case.
How did Marcial Dorado and Alberto Núñez Feijóo meet? As explained by the first in El Mundo, months after the images saw the light, it was through Manuel Cruz, who at that time was the driver of the Xunta adviser José Manuel Romay Beccaría. The relationship between the smuggler and Feijóo would have begun to get closer in 1994 and the last contact, Dorado explained, was the burial of Manuel Cruz. Cruz died in 1999 in a traffic accident, some time after being implicated in a court case as a front man for Dorado. The drug trafficker denied, in this same interview, that he had spoken to Feijóo on the phone a few years later.
Marcial Dorado, with a sentence from 2009 and another from 2015, is serving the remainder of his sentence in the third degree in an open regime. This semi-liberty was granted to him in 2020 and will last until 2025, when he will serve his sentence.
