MEXICO'S TROUBADORS HAIL NEW KIND OF HERO

Culture: Bands sell millions of CDs celebrating drug traffickers' fabled
wealth and violent,anti-establishment lifestyle.

San Luis Potosi,Mexico-As Mario Quintero steps to the microphone,
strums his guitar and begins singing about the pleasures of snorting
cocaine after a few drinks, scores of teenage girls crowd the outdoor
stage screaming, " I love you, Mario!"

Quintero and his wildly popular band, the Tucanes de Tijuana, or
Toucans of Tijuana, follow with a song about a smuggler's love for his
rooster, parrot and goat, underworld symbols for marijuana,cocaine and
heroin.

"I live off my three fine animals," Quintero sings to roars of
approval from thousands of cowboy-hatted fans packed into an outdoor
concert grounds here. His next ballad in "Most Wanted Men," in which
he assumes the voice of a powerful trafficker who boasts about bribing
politicians and police "to control whole countries."

The Tucanes are one of the most successful of hundreds of Mexican
country bands whose lyrics chronicle traffickers' daily lives and
violent routines. The extraordinary popularity of their music here and
in the United States underscores the profound roots the drug industry
has sunk into North American popular culture, suggesting that millions
of fans quietly admire the smugglers' fabled wealth,
anti-establishment bravura and bold entrepreneurial skills.

"The drug trade has permeated our social fabric," said Manuel
Valenzuela, a professor at a research institute in Tijuana who studies
the drug ballads, known in Spanish as narco-corridos.

"The political elite, the army, the church and the bakes have all been
corrupted, and in this context many young people see in narcotics
their route to early wealth, even if they fear dying before they're
25. The corridos just reflect this evolution."

Mexican songwriters have been composing corridos for at least a
century, chronicling the heroic deeds of revolutionary generals and
border brigands. Marijuana and opium smugglers became the subjects of
choice in the 1970s, with the early corridos often concluding with
morality lessons about the evils of the drug trade.

But in the '90s, young musicians like the Tucanes have carried the
corridos toward overt celebration of the narcotics culture,
punctuating many recordings with machine-gun fire and police sirens.

Lidia Salazar, a marketing executive for EMI Music Mexico, said the
Tucanes sold 2.5 million CDs in 1997 and might have exceeded that
record last year had the government not barred corridos from the airwaves.

Quintero, 28, and his three fellow musicians were born in the hills of
Sinaloa, the state that is a major opium and marijuana producer and is
the birthplace of most major Mexican traffickers. Like many other
Sinaloans, they migrated to Tijuana as teenagers, working for a time
in factories there before forming the Tucanes in 1987 to play for
local dances and house parties.

Their first hit was in 1992, "Clave Privada," or "Private Pin." It
chronicled the exploding use of beepers among drug wholesalers and
their street salesmen in Mexico and the United States.

Quintero, who writes all the Tucanes material, said he gleaned his
material from the daily press.

"This is like news writing," he said, asserting that fans, like
newspaper readers, are fascinated by the details of the top
traffickers' lives. "Just their names sell recordings," he said.

At the San Luis Potosi concert grounds, Luis Gaspar Perez, 30, the
manager of a grocery store, explained his devotion to the Tucanes.

"They tell the truth about our society," Gaspar said.