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Ballads of narcotics traffickers hit a sour note with officials
By Anne-Marie O'Connor
Los Angeles Times
Posted November 7 2002
http://makeashorterlink.com/?K16F22562 .
TIJUANA, Mexico ? It was supposed to be the day the music died.
In an elegant hotel salon, the governor of Baja California gathered with guests of honor to witness a solemn promise to purge the state's radio
airwaves of "narco-ballads" -- songs about narcotics traffickers -- a genre as popular, gory and hard to banish as gangsta rap.
"Narco-ballads set a bad example for the younger generation," said Mario Enrique Mayans Concha, president of the Baja California chapter of Mexico's
Chamber of Radio and Television Industry, who has presided over the 3-month-old ban.
But on a recent night at a crowded Avenida Revoluci?n hangout, men in 10-gallon hats, leather dusters and cowboy boots were stamping their feet and
singing along to a narcocorrido about a death match between a drug lord and a cop.
This is Mexico's latest culture war, unfolding on its newest front: the cradle of the Tijuana drug cartel.
For the establishment, the enemy is narcocultura, the pop culture fascination with Mexico's gangster underworld and its overlords.
Officials are tired of seeing reliquaries of the so-called narco-saint, Jesus Malverde, sold on the steps of the downtown cathedral. They're tired of
seeing the accused Tijuana drug lord Eduardo Arellano, as photogenic with his tousled good looks as a jeans model, smiling jauntily back at them from
a "Most Wanted" poster at the U.S. border crossing.
Mexican regional music, which includes narcocorridos, already claims slightly more than half of the $600 million a year in U.S. sales of Latin music
-- and Los Angeles is a major market.
"Ballads are a tradition in Mexican music, it's true -- but ballads about the heroics of the Mexican Revolution and other historic moments," said
Mayans, of the radio trade association. "The narco-ballad is not a tradition."
But narcocorridos are a modern manifestation of a musical tradition that is as old as Mexico itself. Around the campfires of the Mexican Revolution,
troubadours rallied illiterate soldiers and peasants with songs about battlefield victories. During Prohibition, they sang of rumrunners. In modern
times, they celebrated heroes such as labor leader Cesar Chavez.
Today they sing of drug lords, with such faithful attention to headlines that one Tijuana television journalist used a narco-ballad as the mock
narration for news footage of a splashy murder.
It was a particularly grisly drug killing that provided the catalyst for the movement to ban the ballads, some say.
But the lingering mystique of the narco-pose was all too evident on a recent night at the "Cowboy Bar" in Tijuana. A musician at the bar, Abel Guzman,
sings a favorite about the notorious torture-murder of a U.S. anti-drug agent.
"The death of Enrique Camarena is a legend, so it became a corrido," Guzman said. "If someone is killed, people write a corrido about it, and his
death becomes history."
But in Baja California, "the problem" is a particularly touchy subject.
Nearly everyone in high-end Tijuana knows someone with onetime links to the Arellano Felix crime family.
Priests baptized their children. Businessmen "borrowed" money from them. Public officials sold land to them. Local families intermarried with them.
And radio stations played songs about their exploits.
"It seems hypocritical that the people who created the market for narcocorridos, who popularized them, now want people to stop listening to them,"
said Victor Clark, the respected director of Tijuana's private Binational Center for Human Rights.
"Prohibiting them will just turn them into the forbidden fruit," he said. "Narcocorridos are deeply established now in the popular culture of northern
Mexico."
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http://www.guadalajarareporter.com/fullcover.cfm?id=7
by Tovin Lapan
"Me buscan por chacalosa, soy hija de un traficante. Conozco bien las movidas, me crei entre la mafia grande. De la mejor mercancia, me ense?o a
vender mi padre."
"I am wanted for being chacalosa, I am a trafficker's daughter. I know all the moves, I grew up around the top mafia. My father taught me how to sell
the best merchandise."
These defiant and forthright lyrics are not a sample of the latest hip-hop song from Los Angeles, but rather a line from a popular Mexican
narcocorrido, which use a centuries-old style of storytelling through song to publicize the violent and daring exploits of Mexico's drug traffickers.
Corridos - meaning a running ballad, from the verb correr (to run) - can be traced as far back as the 17th century, and were used widely during the
Mexican War of Independence to spread tales of heroes to the illiterate masses and spur revolution. They developed into specific art form in the Civil
War of mid 19th century. Thousands of corridos were written during Reform period and French occupation of Mexico.
The genre reached its heyday during the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, serving as a kind of oral news magazine. Corridistas passed along messages and
news of the war through their ballads. Revolutionary leaders, including Pancho Villa, had their own personal trovadores.
Now the corrido style has been appropriated by northern song writers who are paid by the wealthiest drug cartels to sing of clandestine smuggling
trips, murders and money. However, narcocorridos have garnered a much wider audience than drug traffickers and other criminals. Many people from the
impoverished areas of Mexico's northern desert relate to the songs' honest telling of their way of life.
Traditional corrido singers are rare today, making a living by traveling from town to town with their guitar and using adept improvisation and
enormous repertoires to tell the stories of modern Mexico.
Narcocorridos, on the other hand, are one of the top-selling styles of music in all of Latin America. There is no short supply of desperate Mexicans
living in the northern states of Sonora, Baja California or Chihuahua willing to write songs for wealthy drug barons who pay handsomely to have their
exploits immortalized to a polka beat. In northern Mexico drug traffickers are possibly the biggest sponsors of budding musicians.
Just like hip-hop and rap from the United States, narcocorridos present startlingly honest and vivid pictures of life in poor areas dominated by the
drug business. The language is strong and often vulgar. Many album covers for narcocorridos feature the singer wearing expensive clothes and jewelry
standing by a fast car holding a gun.
The narcocorrido subculture even has its own Tupac Shakur. Chalino Sanchez, one of the first and most popular narcocorrido singers, was pulled from
his car and murdered after a show in 1992. Chalino had fled to the United States after killing a man who had raped his sister. He saved up money in
the United States to record his first corrido, a homage to his brother who was murdered in a Tijuana hotel. He then started taking offers from drug
traffickers, charging up to 2,000 dollars to compose songs about their lives.
Also similar to rap music, narcocorridos tell the stories of people who have no voice. People relate to the music because it is the first time that
the plight of disenfranchised populations living near the U.S. border has been publicly expressed.
"In Baja California and Chihuahua they have banned certain songs, but the people keep listening because it is part of their identity. The themes of
the songs suggest a complex social problem that can not be negated or censured," explains Miguel Olmos, professor of cultural studies at the College
of the Northern Border.
However, the vulgar lyrics and explicit content of narcocorridos have not gone unnoticed by the Mexican government. Both the Michoacan and Baja
California state governments have signed agreements with radio stations not to play narcocorridos or any other music that "goes against good, moral
customs and apologizes for violence." The radio ban will have little affect on the dissemination of narcocorridos if U.S. stations along the border do
not adopt the ban as well. Most radio stations in Mexico, while they have no official policy, refrain from airing narcocorridos.
Yet, at this year's International Cervantino Festival, one of the most popular narcocorrido groups, Los Tigres del Norte, were honored with a special
presentation. Many people protested that the group was not worthy of attention from a music and art festival that typically presents shows of "high
culture."
Los Tigres del Norte first rose to popularity with the song "Contrabando y Traicion" (Contraband and Treachery) which tells the story of a couple of
smugglers on a long trip with the tires of their car full of marijuana. However, the band does not simply sing about drugs, alcohol and money. Many
people identify with Los Tigres because they sing, candidly, about their feelings on anything from lost love to government oppression.
Sales of narcocorrido CDs and tapes remain high, even outside of Mexico. And the added attention the songs have received lately due to radio bans has
served as publicity for the groups. Just as rap CDs continue to sell in the United States despite poor radio play, the narcocorridos will most likely
continue to flourish in face of the public attacks.
"[Narcocorridos] are the best example of a genre that has been nurtured by the drive of the masses and diffusion through globalization," Olmos says.
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