MEXICAN SONGS CHRONICLE ATTACKS

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Northern Mexico's folk musicians who sing about drug
lords and bloodshed to accordion riffs and strumming guitars are now
filling the airwaves with ballads about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and
the world's most wanted outlaw: Osama bin Laden.

Radio stations across northern Mexico have been playing songs like "Black
11th," "Tragedy in Manhattan," and "The ballad of Osama bin Laden."

Disc jockey Paco Nunez said the folk songs, known as corridos, are among
the most requested on his program.

"A lot of people in this region know the details of what happened because
of the corridos more than the news," said Nunez, whose radio show, Ranchera
de Monterrey, is aired across northern Mexico and on Spanish radio stations
in the United States.

"The news just recounts the story one or two times, whereas people can buy
a cassette of corridos and never forget what happened because they listen
to it over and over as a song. That way it's remembered as more than just a
historic event."

The cassette featuring "The Black 11th," or "11 Negro," played by Los
Estrellas del Bravo, went on sale late Friday in Monterrey. The compact
disc was scheduled to be released next week.

"I want the people, the world, wherever my lyrics are heard, to know that
Mexico is lamenting a lot, and Monterrey is lamenting the situation in
which a lot of Americans, and countless nationalities, including Mexicans,
were killed," said Filogonio Contreras, who wrote "11 Negro" for the
Monterrey group. At least 15 Mexicans died in the World Trade Center attack.

"This isn't being morbid. It's lamenting the fact that our brothers and
sisters died," he said.

Many of the corridos, like "Tragedy in Manhattan" by farmer Jose Alejandro
Vega, express sadness.

But the tunes of Rigoberto Cardenas, 39, who penned the bin Laden corrido,
are also critical: "By sky, by sea, by land/Osama bin Laden/they are
looking for you/bin Laden/The terrorist that the CIA trained/That was the
biggest mistake of the American government."

The lyrics, which rhyme in Spanish, refer to claims by Western and Middle
Eastern sources that bin Laden received U.S. support to fight Soviet troops
in Afghanistan as he was shaping his al-Qaida terrorist network. Bin Laden
insists he never took CIA funds.

Cardenas, who said the song is titled "The mistake of the CIA," is working
on a cassette of a dozen corridos about Sept. 11, when hijackers believed
tied to bin Laden slammed commercial airliners into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. Cardenas recently finished one called "The Anthrax Corrido."

"I decided to do this because we composers, like the press, look for the
news and report it," said Cardenas, who lives in Colima state on the
Pacific coast.

By tradition, corridos comment on current events, the famous -- or the
infamous.

"Corridos are about life and all its happenings," said Maynardo Vazquez,
who researches corridos at Nuevo Leon's Autonomous University in Monterrey.
"If there was an explosion in the city today, tomorrow there would be a
corrido about it. They relate what has happened through the language of the
people."

Corridos were used as a way to spread news by traveling minstrels in the
1800s and early 1900s. Many of the old songs are about revolutionaries.

Today's corridos are a contemporary variation. Many are about the
difficulties of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, relating tales of drug
smugglers paying off police or Mexican migrants dying in the desert while
trying to sneak into the United States. Critics say the drug songs glorify
smugglers, and the so-called narco-corridos are banned in some parts of Mexico.

But those who write them say they are just recounting life.

Contreras, 69, has written more than 300 songs, chronicling everything from
California's controversial Proposition 187 that banned Mexican immigrants
from government services to the murder of popular Tejano music singer
Selena, a song that sold more than 30,000 copies.

Requests for a copy of his latest song came in from across Mexico and the
United States even before it went on sale Friday.

At the Juarez market's Centro Casetero in Monterrey, owner Jorge Caballero
stocked shelves with the cassettes and said he'd been getting requests for
tapes all week.

"More than anything," he said, "this narrates history and how the world
came together in solidarity over such a horrible act."