MEXICO'S TROUBADORS TURN FROM AMOR TO DRUGS

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 teen-age 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 is "Most Wanted Men," in which he assumes the voice
of a powerful trafficker who boasts about bribing politicians and the
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 banks 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.

"Radio stations all over Mexico have told us that the Interior Ministry has
forbidden them from playing the corridos," Ms. Salazar said.

A senior government official said there was no formal ban. But the official
acknowledged that Interior Minister Francisco Labastida Ochoa had
repeatedly met the owners of radio stations and leaders of the National
Chamber of the Radio and Television Industry to condemn the corridos. Ochoa
was expressing his view "that making drug traffickers into heroes is
damaging to Mexican youth."

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 teen-agers, 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.

Their notoriety spread in 1997, when a magazine, Proceso, published the
confession of an accused trafficker, Alejandro Hodoyan, who in a lurid
description of the Tijuana drug underworld said Quintero had composed many
corridos that documented killings carried out by the Arellano Felix
brothers, who are said to control the drug trade in northwestern Mexico.

Quintero's corridos outline a code of behavior for traffickers, Hodoyan
said, adding:

"If you listen carefully, the songs tell how the Arellanos killed these
people. I don't know how he gets his information. But through the corridos
comes the philosophy, how the members of the cartel have to behave. They
tell you what they did wrong. Why they were killed. You learn what you have
to do so they won't kill you."

In appreciation of the Tucanes' insightful work, the Arellanos bought them
uniforms, sound equipment and a touring bus, Hodoyan said.

In a preconcert interview in their bus in San Luis Potosi, Quintero denied
knowing the Arellanos. "We worked for years playing private parties in
Tijuana," he said. "We don't know everyone who hired us, and we didn't ask
to see their police records."

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.

On the concert tour, the Tucanes appear to be models of clean living. They
pump up before performances by guzzling fruit milkshakes, and on stage they
drink only bottled water.

"I want to be a good example to my children," said Clemente Flores, the
bass player.

But they cultivate a violent image, pretending in their music videos to be
the gunslinging traffickers of their ballads. In one popular video,
Quintero and his accordion player kill several police officers with
automatic rifles. In another, they appear alongside a man tied to a chair
who is being tortured, apparently by traffickers.

Other corrido singers have blurred the distinction between life and art,
with violent consequences. Chalino Sanchez, a corrido singer from Los
Angeles who liked to keep a pistol thrust in his belt at performances, was
killed by gunmen in Culiacan, Sinaloa, after a concert in May 1992.

The violent backdrop of the music has prompted academic debate.

"In seminars people stand up and say, 'Corridos are terrible, they glorify
criminals,"' a professor in Mexico City, Jorge Chabat, said. "And they do,
of course. But people like them, and this is related to the Mexican psyche.
People see traffickers as men of humble origins who defy the power
structure. That can be attractive. Traffickers are a kind of self-made man,
Mexican style."

Another professor, Maria Herrera-Sobek, argued at a conference at the
University of California at Los Angeles last year that corridos celebrate
the same masculine virtues assigned to war heroes in the United States and
Europe.

"They attribute to traffickers characteristics that indicate a high degree
of respect, including bravery, manliness, justice and candor," Professor
Herrera-Sobek said. "Others that are not necessarily tied to morality but
are positive values within our culture are cunning, strength, fame and
ferocity."

At the San Luis Potosi concert grounds, Luis Gaspar Perez, 30, the manager
of a grocery store, stood watching the performance, his breath hanging
heavy in the chill night air as he explained his devotion to the Tucanes.

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