Narcocorridos

Elijan Wald's Narcocorrido, a fascinating history/travelogue/critique of songs about drug traffic and traffickers, was the first book about Mexico that I read after arriving in Mexico, and I couldn't have made a better choice. Life in Culiacan is dominated by the drug trade, and the music celebrating it is also centered here in the State of Sinaloa, although it has spread out across the country and into the southwestern United States as well.

Corridos are essentially ballads, a folk/traditional form, and often the music accompanying them is in the norteno style, which draws on Central European polka and waltz rhythms and employs the accordion and bajo sexto 12-string guitar as its predominant instruments. In many ways, corridos are very old-fashioned even if they are written on contemporary themes, and they seem to have zero appeal to my urban-sophisticate prepa students, who are into all manner of contemporary pop sounds from hip-hop to Lady Gaga.

Wald doesn't make any great claims for the music itself, which tends towards a sameness, but the point of corridos and ballads generally has always been the words; they can and have functioned as a kind of musical newspaper. Any event can be quickly worked up into a corrido. And certainly the drug world is full of events - and larger-than-life personalities (including the biggest of all, Chapo Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel, currently on the lam after a jail break and, following the death of Osama Bin Laden, Numero Uno most wanted on both the FBI and Interpol lists).

Several of the corridistas interviewed by Wald, most of whom sound like rather peaceable souls, warn that in corridos about narco bosses, it is almost always inadvisable to get too specific about which boss you are describing. You might curry favor with that boss by depicting him as the toughest guy out there, but you will also intensely displease his competition - and the business is nothing if not competitive; that is what generates most of the grisly executions you read about in the papers. Rival cartels are always fighting for control of the trade in specific "plazas," cities and geographic areas. Although the government tries to portray itself as against all cartels equally, in actuality it cedes each plaza to a particular cartel and comes down on the others, thus working in part as the dominant cartel's muscle (and really, a lot of police and military officers and government officials are on the cartels' take). Details about these unsavory connections can be found in John Gibler's To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War (which was the second Mexican-themed book I read after my arrival; now I'm onto Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields).

As will happen with an extremist genre, however, narcocorridos operate in a "can you top this" atmosphere, and inevitably, many writers and performers have ignored the sensible advice about being non-specific and thrown in their lot with this or that cartel and boss - not least because they might see some money or gifts out of the relationship (although this is always denied by the musicians). The newer, more over-the-top narcocorrido style is known as "Movimiento Alterado":

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=437914&CategoryId=13003

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/movimiento-alterado-sinaloa_n_1163608.html

The second article mentions that some Movimiento Alterado musicians wear bulletproof vests on stage, and well they might, because they are playing a dangerous game. Last November, a young singer, Diego Rivas of the Guaruras band, was gunned down in front of his house in Culiacan, undoubtedly by those who took exception to his lyric praise of Chapo Guzman.

http://hngwiusa.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/rivas-who-glorified-mexican-sinaloa-cartel-drug-lord-el-chapo-in-songs-killed-in-culiacan/

In contemporary Mexico, murders are almost always messages, but this message - Don't affiliate! - has been sent to musicians again and again in recent years, and little heed has been taken. In 2010, it was singer Sergio Vega:

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/06/28/mexican-singer-killed-hours-after-denying-hed-died/

In 2007, it was singer Sergio Gomez:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xJM-KASoTQ4J:www.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7126594.stm+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk\

In 2006, it was singer Valentin Elizalde:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valent%C3%ADn_Elizalde

And just this weekend, as reported at the invaluable blog Borderland Beat, gunmen burst into a Chihuahua nightclub and mowed down the band La 5a Banda, killing five of its members as well as four club patrons:

Among the band's popular songs is "El Corrido de La Linea" a narco-corrido glorifying the group of hitmen that makes up Juarez cartel's enforcement arm.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2012/02/nine-dead-in-chihuahua-night-club.html

La 5a Banda

As one anonymous commenter at Borderland Beat wrote, "Norteño singers keep glorifying criminals, the price to pay is dead, the fame will be your glory." The old philosophy of "Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse" is alive and well in Mexico.

UPDATE (4/2/2012): The drummer of the band Enigma Norteno, another group that gets very specific in its lyrics, was kidnapped in a Culiacan mall on Friday, March 30, and discovered dead a day later:

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2012/04/police-find-wrapped-body-encobijado-of.html

And then a mourner was kidnapped from his funeral!

http://latinamericacurrentevents.com/man-kidnapped-at-funeral-of-musician-in-culiacan-sinaloa-mexico/17259/