BALLADS OF THE DRUG TRADE

Journalist Delves Into New Mexican-Border 'Narcocorridos'

NARCOCORRIDO: A Journey Into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas. By
Elijah Wald. Rayo/HarperCollins, $24.

JOURNALISTS have long been hooked on drug stories, and Elijah Wald has
gotten his fix by focusing on a new tune for an old song. His latest book
is devoted to narcocorridos, ballads that tell a story about the drug traffic.

The topic seems frivolous, but Wald makes a cogent argument for the
importance of delving into a music that has become increasingly popular in
the past 30 years in Mexico and the United States. The corridos not only
provide catchy tunes for country dancing but also serve as an archaic form
of spreading the news and chronicling the gunfights of drug traffickers and
other underworld happenings.

Sounding more like a scholar than a journalist, Wald expounds on the
importance of his subject. "The corrido world," he writes, "provides a
street-level view of all the surreal juxtapositions of modern Mexico: the
extreme poverty and garish wealth, the elaborate courtesy and brutal
violence, the corruption and craziness, sincerity and mythologizing, poetry
and excitement and romance."

Fortunately, the rest of the book takes a more casual tone. Wald offers a
brief history of the corrido and explains that it evolved from the Spanish
ballad style and took root on the Mexican border sometime in the 19th
century. The early corridos were mostly about heroic outlaws. During the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 they reached national popularity as they
detailed the victories of generals, especially Pancho Villa.

The corridos went into a decline shortly after the revolution but came back
strong in the 1970s, when Los Tigres del Norte (the Tigers of the North)
recorded two hits, Contrabando y Traicion (Smuggling and Betrayal) and La
Banda del Carro Rojo (The Red Car Gang). The corrido boom that followed
sparked Wald's interest, and he headed south to interview the composers
"who had turned the corrido from a dying folk style into one of the most
vibrant and relevant art forms in the Americas."

In Mexico, Wald hitched rides with truck drivers to seek their knowledge
about narcocorridos. He ventured into the western states known for
producing drugs and narcocorridos, and searched for the most famous
songwriters of this genre and wrote profiles of them.

Traveling with his guitar, Wald was often mistaken for a drug dealer or a
drug enforcement agent, but he managed to track down his sources and
establish a rapport with them. He begins with the father of the
narcocorrido, Angel Gonzalez, who lives in a small town in Chihuahua, and
then proceeds to Durango to interview the master songwriter Paulino Vargas.

One gets the sense that these older songwriters were like medieval
minstrels who had a genuine interest in telling stories that captured the
headlines of a community. But the newer generation, sensing money to be
made, took the songs to an extreme.

Chalino Sanchez invented the "friendship corrido" in which the song praises
the bravery of a gang member. Sanchez was the Tupac Shakur of Mexico. He
sang about the dangerous world of drugs and lived that life, too. After he
was murdered execution-style, a host of Sanchez imitators followed.

Midway through the book, the narcocorrido theme begins to drag, and Wald,
sensing this, changes pace and goes further into Mexico to research the
corridos that tell of guerrilla warfare, political corruption and
massacres. Near Acapulco, Wald meets a Catholic priest who writes corridos
as a way of informing the people about the Mexican government's mass
killings of peasants protesting social injustice.

Wald saves the best corrido songwriter for last. Teodoro Bello writes
mainly for Los Tigres del Norte, and his songs on that group's Jefe de
Jefes (Boss of Bosses) album raised the corrido form to a new standard. His
poetic songs tell of fearless drug lords -- some of whom are women -- poke
fun at the Mexican government and sympathize with the travails of
undocumented workers who go to the United States.