Jailed drug kingpin sues Netflix over portrayal as cocaine trafficker
Laureano Oubiña served 22 years in prison for trafficking hashish. Picture: EDUARDO PARRA/GETTY IMAGES
By ISAMBARD WILKINSON
12:05PM NOVEMBER 24, 2023
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A convicted “narco” godfather from the drug-smuggling clans of Spain’s northwest coast is suing Netflix for $2.5 million for portraying him as an impotent and violent cocaine trafficker.

Laureano Oubina, 77, who was released in 2017 after serving 22 years in prison for trafficking hashish, claims that the television series Cocaine Coast (Farina) caused him “moral damage”.

“The life of Mr Laureano Oubina has worsened considerably since the broadcast of this series because he is portrayed as a person capable of taking the life of another, violent, sexist, a cocaine trafficker, impotent, vicious, unfaithful, a bad father, a bad husband, a brute, foolish, vengeful, an abuser of women, ignorant and a mafioso,” said Jorge Paladino, his lawyer.

Cocaine Coast gives a fictionalised account of the rise of Galicia’s narco-clans in the 1980s and 1990s in the region’s lush inlets and Atlantic waters. In the 1940s Galician clans smuggled items such as sugar and soap from Portugal. Two decades later the trade moved to American tobacco but then evolved into smuggling hashish from Morocco and cocaine from Colombia.

The series, which premiered in August 2018 and reached 2.5 million Spanish homes, opens with Oubina, who was considered the largest transporter of hashish among Galician traffickers, and his wife in their luxurious rural estate, Pazo de Baion. The mansion was seized and sold by the state for $25 million in 2008.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/wo...s-story/6c746253d5fa414d869d950de60d9fc9