DRUG BALLADS HIT SOUR NOTES

Music: Officials Are Trying to Ban the Mexican Equivalent of Gangsta Rap,
Saying It Is a Bad Influence.

TIJUANA -- 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, the sober, suited president of the Baja
California chapter of Mexico's Chamber of Radio and Television
Industry, who has presided over the 2-month-old ban.

But on a recent night at a crowded Avenida Revolucion 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.

They're irritated that a growing number of young people seem to know
by heart the lyrics of a tune that boasts that "the little Colombian
rock is making me famous."

But can Mexico, a U.S.-certified partner in the war on drugs, quell a
popular regional musical genre with an official scolding. When senior
clergymen called for a government ban this summer on a Mexican movie
about a carnally passionate priest, the film became a runaway hit.

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
rum-runners. In modern times, they celebrated heroes like 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.

In February 2001, masked men with automatic weapons lined up 12 boys
and men and gunned them down in El Limoncito, a tiny village in the
Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa--a massacre attributed to a drug turf
war.

A few months later, at a broadcasters' convention in Sinaloa, the
birthplace of Mexico's most famous traffickers, radio owners announced
they would no longer play narcocorridos in the state.

"If they could do it there," Mayans reasoned, "there was no reason we
couldn't do it in Baja California."

Last December, the Mexican Senate exhorted states to restrict
narcocorridos, saying the songs "create a virtual justification for
drug traffickers."

Influence on Teens

In January, Chihuahua legislators adopted a nonbinding resolution
asking radio stations not to play the songs, calling them a siren call
to a life of "violence, criminality and drug trafficking" that
"teenagers imitate to the detriment of society."

Consensus in Baja California jelled in July. Broadcasters gathered in
a tastefully understated salon of the Hotel Lucerna and signed the
pact.

"It's not an obligation or a censorship. It's voluntary," Mayans
said.

Programmers agreed to support Mexican traditions, and "the
narcocorrido is not a Mexican tradition," he said. "The narcocorrido
is an apology for violence."

But the lingering mystique of the narco-pose was all too evident on a
recent night at the "Cowboy Bar" on Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana.
Onstage, the dashing, mustachioed Roman Coronado sang about a Mexican
federal policeman who defected to work for the drug cartel.

"Give me a line of coke," Coronado sang. "I was once a federal agent,
but it did me no good, because the Mafia was too numerous, and the
police too few."

When four glowering young men swept into the bar, patrons got out of
their way. Waiters tripped over themselves to provide the sullen
quartet with Remy Martin. Women whispered: Who are they.

"It's narco-fashion," acknowledged one of the mystery men, Luis
Esquivel, 23, resplendent in canary yellow ostrich skin boots and a
red leather coat, while his three companions sported black leather and
enough gold jewelry to reduce the national debt.

"It's all about trying to act like narcos, drug dealers, to get
respect," said Esquivel. "I like to give that impression. You get the
girls' attention right away."

The real life of this electric cowboy is more banal: Esquivel is a San
Diego community college student.

"It's more the younger generation that likes narcocorridos," Esquivel
said. "It's like rap and hip-hop. A lot of the corridos are associated
with drugs and Mafia in Tijuana ... They see big-time Mafiosos living
a fantasy, doing whatever they want."

Another musician at the bar, Abel Guzman, sings a favorite
narcocorrido, about a drug cartel gunman who is called before his
godfather boss to sputter out his denial of involvement in 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 explained. "If someone is killed, people write a corrido about
it, and his death becomes history. That's why people love corridos."

For hard-core fans, paramilitary kitsch seems part of the
appeal.

The album cover of "Mi Oficio es Matar"--"Killing is My
Business"--shows singer Jesus Palma with a bazooka. Fabian
Ortega--"the Falcon of the Sierra"--dressed up his album cover cowboy
look with an AK47 assault rifle.

Narcocorridos eschew the crowing roosters and barnyard sounds of
ranchera music for more urban atmospherics--sirens, gunfire and
helicopters.

Art, Life Intersect

The industry is rife with rumors of relationships between musicians
and traffickers.

Some balladeers have stumbled over the line between art and life, and
become the victims of the violence they portray.

Rosalino Sanchez, a poor Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles, rose to
fame as a narcocorrido star--"Chalino"--whose street "cred" was
enhanced by the pistol he wore in his belt and the gunman who wounded
him onstage near Palm Springs.

In 1992, when the 31-year-old singer returned to his home state of
Sinaloa, he disappeared after a concert. His bullet-riddled body
turned up later on a roadside.

A few years later the genre exploded into the mainstream.

By 1997, the composers of some of the most memorable narco-ballads,
Los Tucanes of Tijuana, had more hits on the Latin Billboard chart at
the same time than any artist since Selena. Reviews of Tucanes videos
of that era described scenes of a policeman being shot and another
being tortured--presumably by drug traffickers.

Tucanes' lead singer, Mario Quintero, said the narcocorrido radio
blackout "is not the solution."

"The movie 'Traffic' is like a corrido made into a film, but obviously
you can't prohibit a movie," he said in an e-mail from Acapulco.

"Prohibiting narcocorridos will not solve the problem."

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."

Yet radio stations have gone along with the ban. Some listeners call
in to register their disappointment--but others just tune in to
narcocorridos broadcast from stations north of the border.

"There are a lot of stations in Southern California that play
[narcocorridos], and they are high-powered enough to be heard in
Tijuana," lamented Gloria Enciso, of Tijuana's Radio Enciso. "They
should ban narcocorridos from the recording studios."

There's no sign officials will try to remove the forbidden music from
the honky-tonks where it first emerged.

City patriarchs might publicly support the radio initiative, but more
than a few of them own nightclubs where narcocorridos are still
popular--and profitable.

"Patrons like them. They request them," shrugged Manuel Rodriguez, 30,
a waiter at the Cowboy Bar. "It's not the ballads' fault there's so
much drug violence."