TIJUANA BAND HAS FANS HOOKED ON DRUG-WAR BALLADS

TIJUANA -- Before roughly 35,000 fans, Los Tucanes de Tijuana stood
shimmering in silver-spangled suits and black hats on a recent Saturday
night, belting out one of their best-known numbers. It told of a piqata for
adults, filled not with candy, but little bags of "something more
expensive": in other words, drugs.

As drug smugging proliferates on the U.S.-Mexico border, Los Tucanes de
Tijuana join a growing number of norteqo groups using the traditional
Mexican ballads, or corridos, to tell the stories of today's drug
traffickers.

Bungled police raids on suspected safehouses, a drug-laden airplane buried
in Baja California Sur, corrupt U.S. and Mexican anti-drug agents, a farmer
who gets away with growing an illegal crop -- all are topics of recent
songs, known as narcocorridos, by the Tijuana-based group.

"We have an abundance of material," says Mario Quintero, the four-member
group's 27-year-old songwriter and lead singer. "All you have to do is
watch the news or buy a newspaper."

Los Tucanes are certainly not the first to sing about drug smuggling. Los
Tigres del Norte and other bands playing northern Mexican music have been
incorporating the theme into their repertoire for decades. But the brash
lyrics of Los Tucanes songs have taken the genre a step further, say
critics worried about the effect on young audiences who flock to their
concerts.

The group hit the headlines last year when a suspect described by law
enforcement authorities as a member of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix
drug cartel said that his bosses had subsidized Los Tucanes and other
norteqo groups.

Los Tucanes shrug off such accusations, conceding they might have
unknowingly performed for members of the Arellano Felix cartel at a private
party, but haven't met them personally. "We haven't had the pleasure,"
Quintero says.

"Everybody criticizes them, but they don't take into account their
generosity, their philanthropy," Quintero says of the powerful drug
cartels, said to have built roads and schools in rural communities and
known to have contributed sums to the Catholic Church. "We respect these
people; we admire them."

Simply attributing Los Tucanes' popularity to their narcocorridos would be
missing the mark. The group's four latest compact discs have sold more than
2 million copies in the United States and Mexico, and many of their
most-popular songs are not about drugs, but love and relations between the
sexes. Their current song, number 20 on Billboard's list of Latin songs, is
called "Hacemos Bonita Pareja," "We Make a Cute Couple."

Still, the surging popularity of drug themes popularized by groups such as
Los Tucanes speaks to their growing pervasiveness in Mexican culture, says
Manuel Valenzuela, a researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte outside
Tijuana.

"Clearly, the codes of narcoculture are becoming incorporated into everyday
life."

Success story

In some ways, Los Tucanes tell a Tijuana success story. They are from the
town of Guamuchil in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, in an agricultural
valley adjacent to a major marijuana and poppy-growing region.

Band members are cousins who came to Tijuana like so many others do -in
search of greater opportunity. Quintero, a junior high school graduate,
worked for a while in a maquiladora.

Sons and grandsons of musicians, Los Tucanes began playing together 11
years ago, performing at bars, weddings, baptisms, 15th birthday parties,
or quinceaqeras. Back at the beginning, longtime associates say, the group
dreamed of one day warming the crowds for better-known norteqo groups such
as Banda El Recodo or Los Temerarios or Los Huracanes del Norte. Now
they're packing their own crowds.

Voices of concern

Despite their growing renown, not everyone is applauding.

Across from Texas, in Ciudad Juarez, the state government's human rights
representative, Eustasio Gutiirrez Corona, two months ago called on
authorities to ban narcocorridos by Los Tucanes and other groups from the
airwaves, saying they encourage crime. But nobody listened, he concedes.
"They're still playing them."

Here on the Tijuana-San Diego border, two popular Spanish-language music
stations under the same ownership, Radio Latina and X-99, refuse to play
narcocorridos.

"Just ask the children who listen to narcocorridos, just ask them what they
want to be when they grow up," says Lorena Salas, programming director at
X-99.

Narcocorridos "represent a reaction against the norms and laws of society,"
says Monsignor Salvador Cisneros, who heads a Catholic parish in Playas de
Tijuana. "There is a segment that looks with curiosity and admiration upon
these men who have evaded justice."

Laced with irony and doubles-entendres, the lyrics played by Los Tucanes
are among the most brazen of the current waves of corridos. "They represent
something that is culturally legitimate, although it's very frightening,"
says James Nicolopulos, a University of Texas professor who has studied the
corrido.

"They're expressing the viewpoint of a marginalized section of society on
both sides of the border, the people who are going to see drug traffickers
as heroes, figures who have escaped a system designed to keep them down,"
Nicolopulos says.

A colorful history

Corridos have been around since the 1800s, and outlaws have been a popular
subject from the beginning: 19th-century textile smugglers, liquor
smugglers of the 1920s, immigrant smugglers in the ensuing decades.

Though earliest narcocorridos can be traced back to the 1940s, the current
wave dates back to the 1970s, pioneered by Los Tigres del Norte, a norteqo
group whose music continues to command a wide following on both sides of
the border.

But in the earlier songs, Nicolopulos says, "the trafficker was beating the
system, getting out of poverty. The element that was celebrated was not
drugs, but the dangerous situation in which these people found themselves."

With Los Tucanes, "there seems to be much more focus on selling and using
the drugs. There's more braggadocio, about 'See, I am getting away with
it.' There's a whole throwing down the gauntlet at the ideology of the drug
war."

The band members shrink from such analysis, and insist they're just playing
songs about what they see around them.

"We're surrounded by narcoculture," says Quintero. "Our public wants to
play narcocorridos, and we can't strip them of that pleasure, because we
depend on them."

Back in Tijuana this month, Los Tucanes drew a record crowd to the
Terrenazo Caliente for an outdoor performance that lasted well over two
hours.

Against a lavish backdrop that included fake palm trees and a mechanical
waterfall, Los Tucanes pounded out song after song, Quintero taking center
stage with his plaintive twang and 12-string guitar, or bajo sexto, as Joel
Higuera, the accordionist and second voice, acted the clown as he hopped to
and fro.

"Mario, Mario, Maaaaario," young girls from both sides of the border
shouted, pushing against the barricades, pleading for a moment of the
singer's attention. Farther back, clusters of youths strutted in elaborate
silk shirts, snakeskin boots and ten-gallon hats.

"Their songs make your blood rise," said Enrique Dmaz, a 21-year-old
maquiladora worker, reciting the lyrics of his favorite Tucanes song,
"Manos Verdes": "Me Dedico al Negocio Prohibido -- I engage in forbidden
trade."

Rosemary Quiroz, 16, listened with a cluster of her girlfriends from Castle
Park High School in Chula Vista. "You get into the music, the beat makes
you dance," she says, then adds: "What people really think about drugs,
they say it in their songs."

Copyright 1998 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.