Football and drugs in the 80s

It is impossible to quantify the direct and indirect victims of American drug trafficking in the last third of the 20th century and it would be irresponsible to compare it with the lives of many people, but soccer was also stained by the drug business.

America de Cali was seventeen years on the Clinton List. Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, along with his brother Gilberto, controlled America de Cali. He was not the only one, and the drug traffickers could manage small and large teams, such as maximum shareholders or leaders in the shade. One of the most popular is Pablo Escobar's Atlético Nacional. Today almost mythologized by the famous television series, he was one of the most dangerous capos of the time. He was one of the most moving and Magazine Forbes of the hundred richest people in the world since 1987, the first year the magazine produced this list, until his death in 1993.

They achieved great sports results, such as the three consecutive finals of the Copa Libertadores del América de Cali or the title of Atlético Nacional in 1989. The economic power was immense and nobody escaped what they used it for. The threats, bribes, and fear they instilled provided all the scores for those teams.

Some of the most famous footballers had a relationship with them. The goalkeeper René Higuita was, in his words, “little friend” of Pablo Escobar and visited him in prison, where his relationships with drug traffickers took him for nine months. The América de los Rodríguez Orejuela met with Maradona to try to sign him for three million dollars before going to Barça.

Galicia

Drug trafficking was so powerful in Galicia at the end of the century that drug traffickers tried to hide it. Sito Miñanco, one of the biggest bosses of the Arousa estuary, took over the equipment from his town, Cambados, of just over ten thousand inhabitants. In other chapters of this report series we have seen how football was used to wash the image and advertise, but in this case the narcos already had everyone in the palm of their hand.

Nacho Carretero tells it in his fantastic book Fariña: “The profile of a great boss had to be completed with football. The Youth Club of Cambados would not be one of the best known teams in Galicia if it were not for Miñanco “.” Ahe start of each championship Sito put 30 million pesetas (180,000 euros) on the table and Youth planned the season with salaries for players higher than Deportivo or Celta de Vigo“” When the president was in Cambados, the team arrived on the field aboard his yacht. “” In the preseason, Miñanco took the team on tour to Panama and Costa Rica. “

This modest team stopped being so and rose from Preferred to Third and from Third to Second B (with 47 points above the second) as fast as the gliders of the time. In those categories, with that budget, those boots, those balls … they were just on another level. Today Cambados fights in the categories of regional football far from its shameful past, which they do not hesitate to distance themselves from. In 2018, when Brais Méndez was referred to as “the son of the Fariña FC striker” (the Celta player's father is Modesto Méndez 'Pupi'), the club came out with a statement expressing outrage: “The CJ Cambados is a club with more than 50 years of history and which has partners, sponsors, players, managers and a whole town that deserves to be treated with more respect”. A few years that Galician society and football would like to forget.