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Both men had used soccer for political and financial gain — and worked in Paraguay’s National Congress to keep sports teams exempt from money-laundering legislation. Cartes funneled tens of millions of dollars to one of the country’s biggest soccer clubs, Libertad, and Galeano threw millions at Deportivo Capiatá, according to government records. Roughly $1.3 million of Galeano’s investment in the team appears to have come from cocaine trafficking, Paraguay’s attorney general would later argue. Erico Galeano, a Paraguayan senator, left. Horacio Cartes, Paraguay’s former president, right. (Obtained by The Washington Post; Daniel Duarte/AFP/Getty Images; iStock)

Galeano and the club declined requests for comment. Cartes’s lawyer, Pedro Ovelar, said that the U.S. sanctions against Cartes represented “political persecution” and that his relationship with Galeano was a “political relationship, not a commercial one.”

By 2016, Galeano was elected president of Capiatá. At games, he sat just above the sideline in the center of the stadium. The team’s popularity translated to his own.

But it had begun to struggle. Capiatá was relegated to the country’s second division in 2019. Once-loyal fans stopped attending games. Players complained that the team’s equipment and gear were inadequate.

When he arrived in 2021, Marset began bankrolling improvements: new physical therapy beds, televisions, better food in the cafeteria. It was enough to win over his teammates. Though he wasn’t formally listed as the team’s owner, he poured drug money into Capiatá, investigators say, and siphoned a portion of its revenue.

The deal was even sweeter than that: Marset also bought himself a spot on the squad.

But the team’s coach, Nuñez, a former player on the Paraguayan World Cup team, was not impressed.

“I had the obligation to win or else they would fire me,” said Nuñez, who initially planned to keep Marset on the bench. “But it wasn’t the same for him. He was just having fun.”

There seemed to be only one person, investigators said, who could have brought Marset to Capiatá: Galeano. Paraguayan prosecutors found that Marset had been using the private jet of Galeano’s company to ferry his associates. Prosecutors also identified property deals between Galeano and Marset’s cartel. They would later indict the senator.

“Erico Galeano Segovia was at the service of the transnational criminal organization, dedicated to the international trafficking of cocaine,” the attorney general’s office wrote this year. The case has yet to go to trial.

Marset initially seemed unconcerned that his soccer career at Capiatá might raise his profile with authorities. He allowed the team to publish his name on its roster before games each week.

But by the end of May 2021, Marset learned that narcotics officers were trying to find him. It appears he was tipped off by high-level contacts in the Paraguayan government, investigators said.

He stopped going to practice at Capiatá. His name was abruptly taken off the team’s roster.

When players passed his empty locker, they asked if anyone had heard from him. No one had.

It would not be his last time playing professional soccer while on the run. Capiatá was only the beginning, proof of what he could get away with.

As the manhunt for Marset grew, he doubled down on his double life as a professional player. He attempted to expand his soccer empire to Europe; he appeared on the starting lineups of new teams in new countries.

It seemed a foolish approach to evading arrest, the kind of arrogance that was destined to backfire.

Except it didn’t.

This is the first of a two-part series. Click on this link to read the second part