What is the difference between 'De lo contrario' and 'Al contrario de'?

Question

As far as I know, "de lo contrario" means "otherwise" and "al contrario de" means "unlike".

Examples:

• Toma el medicamento según las instrucciones del médico; de lo contrario, puede haber consecuencias graves.

• El copiloto se quedó solo en la cabina, al contrario de lo que estipulaba el protocolo.

However, I have heard the following sentence in the Narcos TV series:

De lo contrario de Carlos Castaño, esa no lo va a desarmar. (= Unlike Carlos Castaño, this will not disarm you)

Context: A police officer X was recently disarmed by the right-wing paramilitary unit leader Carlos Castaño in a checkpoint. After that, he was assigned to the satellital phone tapping unit as punishment. The police officer shows up for his new assignment and meets the officer Y, in charge of this unit. Y asks what the police officer knows about technology and shows him the equipment used to track the wireless phone calls. Finally, Y says the sentence above to X, ironically referring to the equipment they will work with and to the fact that X was disarmed while working on the field.

In this sentence, "de lo contrario" means "unlike". Is that an usual additional meaning of this Spanish expression or is it a Colombian regionalism?

Answer 1

Let me try to explain the two cases a bit more:

De lo contrario:

Toma el medicamento según las instrucciones del médico; de lo contrario, puede haber consecuencias graves.

Here, "de lo contrario" would be the same as "en el caso contrario", or "if the opposite happened", or as you said, "otherwise" so the sentence tells you to take the medicine following the doctor's instructions because otherwise, there would be bad consequences.

Al contrario de:

El copiloto se quedó solo en la cabina, al contrario de lo que estipulaba el protocolo.

In this case, "al contrario de" just means "contrary to", so the copilot was alone in the cabin, contrary to the protocol. "Unlike" works sometimes, but it would be more correct to think of it as "opposite/contrary to".

You can also say "al contrario que", when you are contrary to someone and not something:

Yo voté por ella, al contrario que mi amigo (I voted for her, contrary to my friend)

So, "X al contrario de Y" simply indicates that doing X contradicts Y, while "X, de lo contrario Y" indicates that Y would be the consequence of X.

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As for your sentence from Narcos:

De lo contrario de Carlos Castaño, esa no lo va a desarmar. (= Unlike Carlos Castaño, this will not disarm you)

I am from Spain, and don't know about other countries, so it may be as you said a regionalism, but for me in Spanish that sentence does not make sense, because, it means something like "otherwise of Carlos Castaño, that will not disarm him".

The way I would phrase it is:

Al contrario que Carlos Castaño, esa no lo va a desarmar.

Which would mean "Unlike Carlos Castaño, this will not disarm him" or "Unlike Carlos Castaño, this will not disarm you" if you are using the formal.

Answer 2

There is another meaning of "contrario": Lo contrario means "the opposite." The phrase you quoted is, I think, equivalent to

A diferencia del caso de Carlos Castaño, esa no lo va a desarmar.

or

En contraste con el caso de Carlos Castaño, esa no lo va a desarmar.

(I can't quite translate it to English because I don't understand the second clause in the context of the story.)