When police intercepted a ship off the Azores carrying a shipment of 2.4 tonnes of cocaine bound for Galicia in north-west Spain last week, they were surprised when the trail led them to the legendary drug trafficker Manuel Charlín Gama.



The 85-year-old head of the “Charlines” clan, whom everyone assumed had retired, and his son Melchor were among 28 people arrested in raids after the drugs were seized.

Charlín will be a familiar figure to fans of the Netflix series Cocaine Coast, in which he is played by the actor Antonio Durán. The series, titled Fariña (slang for cocaine) in Spanish, is based on the book of the same name by the investigative journalist Nacho Carretero.

“It’s surprising that the ‘old man’, as he’s known, is still in action but it’s not surprising that the Charlines are,” Carretero told the Guardian.

In Fariña, Carretero recounts how the tight-knit clans based in the Rías Baixas turned the fishing ports in southern Galicia into one of Europe’s principal gateways for Colombian cocaine.

The rías, a series of long estuarine inlets in Galicia, have a long tradition of smuggling, but the practice soared during the first 15 years after the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939, a period known as “the hungry years”, when nearly everything was in short supply.

To compensate, Galician smugglers brought in basic commodities such as sugar, rice, cooking oil and soap from neighbouring Portugal, which was then in better economic shape.

By the 1960s, when the roles were reversed, they were smuggling goods from Spain into Portugal, often returning with human cargo in the form of draft-dodgers evading Portugal’s colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique.

Until 1982, smuggling was only a misdemeanour, punishable by a fine, in Spain. Furthermore, as the police were just as poor as everyone else, they tended to turn a blind eye.

“The smugglers enjoyed a climate of tolerance on the part of the authorities and politicians,” says Carretero. “Far from being viewed as criminals, they were respected figures in local society. Many Galicians made a living out of smuggling and were proud of their profession. Almost imperceptibly, this toxic mixture of popular admiration and political complicity laid the basis for what would later degenerate into an almost mafia-like criminal organisation.”

Melchor Charlín, 57, who was arrested alongside his father Manuel. Photograph: Salvador Sas/EPA

He adds that, in due course, smuggling became the most important industry in the rías, such that “living on the margins of legality became more or less habitual”. Charlín himself once confessed that he was “incapable of living within the law”.

The rías are a series of narrow bays, ideal for shellfish farming, that produces almost 90% of all the country’s mussels. However, the jagged coast of the remote region also made it perfect for bringing contraband ashore out of sight of the authorities, even when they bothered to look.

In the 1960s, the smugglers scaled up again, this time into tobacco, initially via Portugal before they cut out the middleman and bought directly from the American tobacco giants.

Tobacco made them millionaires, and soon there was more lucrative work in the rías smuggling tobacco than there was in fisheries. The tobacco was brought in large ships that were unloaded out of sight in the high seas and then brought ashore in launches and fishing boats, a modus operandi that foreshadowed the trade in narcotics.

Wealth brought ostentation in the form of expensive cars, mansions and lavish banquets. It also brought corruption and political influence, and the clans made generous donations to the Alianza Popular, forerunner of the People’s party, Spain’s main conservative party. Carretero’s book was initially banned for exposing these links as the party tried to distance itself from the traffickers.

From tobacco, they moved into hashish imported from Morocco. “Manuel Charlín Gama has the honour of being the first Galician smuggler to land drugs in the ría,” says Carretero, although it was his daughter Josefa who persuaded him that there was more money in hashish than tobacco. From there, it was a small step to the even more profitable trade in cocaine.

“In Galicia, the Colombians found the perfect gateway to extend their business in Europe: infrastructure, people with experience, an almost complete absence of authority and legislation, and a common language,” says Carretero.

A police crackdown in the early 1990s put nearly all the leading narcos, including Charlín, who served 20 years, behind bars. But two years later, the US Drug Enforcement Administration reported that seven tonnes of cocaine had been intercepted in Galicia, a fraction of the estimated 200 tonnes that entered Europe that year. In many cases, the narcos continued to direct operations from their jail cells.

Twelve of the 28 people arrested in last week’s raid have since been remanded. Charlín and his son Melchor were released on bail, but face charges of belonging to a criminal organisation.

Charlín may have enjoyed this brief return to the limelight of notoriety, but reports suggest that he isn’t the big fish he once was and, for lack of capital, played only a peripheral role in last week’s operation.

“The old clans never disappeared, but what this shows is they’re no match for the current crop of Galician narcos whose names never appear in the media,” says Carretero.

As he comments in his book: “So long as there was someone on the other side of the water, the cartels would continue to send their merchandise. And there was always someone on the other side.”