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 Entertainment | June 2008 
They Sing of Coke, Criminals, Killing
 Ioan Grillo - The Daily Telegraph
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It was three in the morning and the Mexican group Banda Guasavena were driving back from a concert at a cockfighting festival, just over the border from Texas. The audience had been even more rapturous than usual and Fausto Castro-Elizalde, the band’s horn player, recalls them chatting happily about the evening. Then Kalashnikov bullets started flying through the window. “The whole moment was unreal,” he says. “One second we were all happy after the show. The next we being cut up by bullets.”
Castro-Elizalde, 34, was hit by seven “caps” in his arm and legs, but miraculously remained conscious. His cousin and the band’s 27-year old singer, Valentin Elizalde, was not so lucky. “He died instantly. He fell into my arms and I kissed him,” says Castro-Elizalde.
Elizalde’s murder is not an isolated incident. In the past two years, assassins have shot, burnt or suffocated at least 15 Mexican musicians. The attacks on musicians come amid a wave of bloodshed in Mexico, which has usurped Colombia as the drug trafficking capital of the Americas, unleashing violent turf wars and fighting with police. For their part, Mexican musicians have been increasingly singing about cocaine, corpses and Kalashnikovs alongside their traditional tales of poverty and lost love.
Almost all the bands targeted included so-called narco corridos, or drug ballads, in their repertoires. The accordions and 12-string guitars create a folksy sound, but the lyrics tell explicit tales of cocaine seizures, execution-style hits and trafficking kingpins, often with real names, dates and places. Although banned on Mexican radio and television, the drug ballad — reminiscent of American gangster rap — has become one of the most popular music styles in the country.
The carnage has claimed both up-and-coming musicians and best-selling artists. Sergio Gomez of K-Paz de la Sierra won a Grammy nomination after releasing Pero Te Vas a Repentir, or ‘You Will Have Regrets’, a love song so catchy that half of Mexico was humming it. He was abducted after a concert and tortured for two days, his genitals being burnt with a blowtorch, before he was strangled with a plastic cord.
The bands are all natives of Sinaloa, the mountainous Pacific state, home to the Sinaloan cartel, the main rival to the Gulf-based mafia. The police have made no arrests, named no suspects and revealed no motives in connection with the murders of 14 musicians (one man has been arrested in the Elizalde killing), although they have said that they all bore the hallmarks of organised crime.
Several musicians have admitted that their links to organised crime go beyond just singing about it. Some play at drug traffickers’ parties, sometimes for very large sums. What’s more, up-and-coming villains pay composers to write songs about them. One lesser-known artist said he would charge £500 to compose a ballad about a gangster’s exploits, while another mid-level writer said he charged about £2,500.
Almost all the high-profile killings, drug busts and arrests are retold in ballads. The songs are often written within days of the events and are rapidly recorded onto compact discs or simply passed around musicians by ear. One ballad describes the February arrest of the alleged kingpin Alfredo “The Ant” Beltran, while another tells of the recent killing of five Mexican soldiers in an ambush. Sometimes these “news” ballads become anthems for the fans, such as one song that describes how the kingpin “Shorty” Guzman escaped from a high-security federal prison in 2001.
The use of the song to relay news goes to the roots of the Mexican corrido. The ballads were born in the late 18th-century in northern Mexico, and would carry news of coronations and beheadings to rural communities which had no other news outlets. In the bloody revolution of 1910-17, thousands of ballads were written about guerrilla commanders such as Pancho Villa — a moustachioed bandit turned revolutionary who won spectacular victories over federal soldiers.
The genre broke into the modern recording industry in the 1970s when Sinaloan band Los Tigres del Norte made records while working as immigrant labourers in California. However, most Sinaloans consider the real father of the drug ballad to be Chalino Sanchez, a small-town roughneck who sang tales of crime and violence in the late 1980s. He was shot dead in an unsolved killing in 1992. Sanchez’s influence on the music scene is undeniable. The ballads are now an integral part of a “narco culture” endemic in many other parts of Mexico and the southern United States.
The lyrics talk with pride about drug trafficking, describing it as a route out of poverty. They mix in the expressions of the Sicilian mafia, calling the crime bosses “capos” and “godfathers”. And they herald the gangsters for being the valientes or “brave ones” who are not scared of police or soldiers.
“The thing that can be hard for foreigners to understand is the pride that some Sinaloans have in being at the head of organised crime,” said Elmer Mendoza, an author from Culiacan. “Mothers can be proud that their sons have become gangsters, even if this leads to death, as it is a way that they have made something of themselves.”
Cesar Jacobo, 33, who founded and composes the songs for Grupo Cartel de Sinaloa, is typical of the new generation that has grown up immersed in drug ballads and narco culture. Moving from rural poverty to an urban slum when he was 10, he heard his father sing love songs at home. But the young Jacobo was only interested in ballads about the gunslingers and crime bosses that ran his barrio.
Grupo Cartel’s explicitly violent lyrics push the barriers of the genre, talking of balaclava-clad assassins and blood-thirsty triggermen, people he says he grew up with. But Jacobo also mixes the reality with fantasies and metaphors. In one ballad he describes a hired killer arriving in hell to be confronted by his murder victims. “For me the words are the most important thing,” he said, singing snippets of his ballads. “I get the message right. Then I make it fit the rhythm.”
A rising number of Mexican politicians argue that drug ballads should be made illegal altogether. Irineo Mendoza, of the Democratic Revolution Party, is preparing a bill that would force record labels to show the lyrics of proposed recordings to government officials. If the words were seen as promoting violence or drugs, the recording would be forbidden.
Other groups simply say the government should work harder to bring down the cartels. President Felipe Calderon claims he is winning the war against the gangs after he ordered a massive crackdown. But some independent investigators say the crackdown is not getting to the root of the problem. The bloodshed is driven by a huge profit motive. Mexican cartels make an estimated $10 billion to $30 billion a year trafficking cocaine, heroin, marijuana and crystal meth to their northern neighbour, in a country where wages are as low as $5 a day.
But the drug ballad bands can, perversely, benefit from the killings. Both K Paz de la Sierra and Guasabena have seen sales rocket since the murders of their lead singers. For some fans they are already martyrs.
“Valentin Elizalde died a hero for many people here,” says Alejandra Aguilera, a friend of the singer in Culiacan. “His spirit lives on. He is still alive in his music.” |
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