PAGE ONE Drugs Muscle Into Mexican Music Mix

Trafficking theme hits popular nerve

Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

King City, Monterey County

From southern Mexico to Northern California, the most effective
propagandist for drug trafficking has a baby face except for the bushy
mustache and a coy, seductive smile.

When Mario Quintero takes the stage to sing about drug lords, cocaine
shipments and shootouts, young men and women scream. He is making converts
to the cause.

For millions of Mexicans on both sides of the border, drug trafficking is
something not to fear or to shun, but to celebrate on the dance floor.

Quintero is songwriter, guitarist and lead singer for Los Tucanes de
Tijuana, one of the hottest bands in northern Mexico and among Mexicans in
the United States. Their latest twoCD release has sold 2 million copies.

Despite the efforts of the U.S. and Mexican governments to fight drug
trafficking, despite all the hoopla of ``Just say no,'' despite the solemn
drumbeat of politicians' pronouncements on the drug war, the message of Los
Tucanes and dozens of other bands may be changing the values of a
generation of young Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

It is legal. It is on the airwaves. It is insidious, seductive and fun.

At a recent Los Tucanes concert in King City, the 2,000 fans in attendance
went wild when the band ripped into its new hit, ``La Pinata.'' The song
tells of a drug lord's party with a pinata full of bags of cocaine.

Quintero smiled and sang about the party's dessert:

``It was the most expensive pinata/in recent years/the cake wasn't of
wheat/it was a Colombian cake/served on plates/with five and six grams
each/if you want to have a pinata/I've got the little bags for you.''

As he sang, a stream of young women jumped up on stage from the audience to
kiss him and the other three band members.

In fact, it seemed as if the entire female audience did the same during the
hourand40minute concert. Young mothers dragging their babies handed them
off to friends, jumped up, planted their redlipstick kisses on sweaty
cheeks one by one and jumped down. Despite the band's superstar status and
what is standard entertainmentindustry practice, no security guards
interfered.

The atmosphere was strangely friendly, nonthreatening, and dare one say?
wholesome. Nowhere to be found was the dark, menacing atmosphere
normally associated with drug trafficking.

Nearly all of the people in the audience had come from the surrounding
Salinas Valley. Most appeared to be migrant workers neatly decked out in
their Sunday best people for whom the $30 entrance fee was almost a full
day's wage.

``I like Los Tucanes because they sing about what's really happening,''
said 18yearold berry picker German Gutierrez as his girlfriend, Rosa
Chavez, 17, hung on his arm and watched the band.

``Drug trafficking is part of life, so why ignore it? And it's not all bad,
anyway. It creates prosperity.''

Although Los Tucanes' drug theme is new, their style is not. Their songs
are part of a genre called corridos, or ballads, which are a principal
variant of nortena music, the main musical fare in northern Mexico.

Corridos have a long history. In the 1500s, their ancestors were the
Andalusian romantic verses brought by Spanish conquerors, and in the 1800s
and early 1900s, they served as a popular form of news bulletin by
traveling minstrels. Assassinations, revolutions, accidents, elections,
strikes, family feuds, shootouts between bandits and the police: All were
grist for corridos.

Corridos are deeply ingrained in Mexican culture, and are a standard form
of marking important events in daily life. When your best buddy gets run
over by a truck or wins the lottery or runs for election as town
councilman, it's time to commission a local band to compose a corrido about
him.

The tunes are singsongy and repetitive, with a simple upand down
cadence, a wheezy accordion and the vocalist's usually nasal whine. To a
foreigner not accustomed to Mexican culture, they are best appreciated with
several tequilas under the belt.

Corridos espouse the simple virtues of northern Mexican culture bravery,
loyalty to friends, machismo, independence, disrespect for the law, a love
of justice for the common man. Women are usually invisible, appearing only
as the fickle love object.

In the 1990s, the favorite theme has become drug trafficking the largest
single industry of northern Mexico and has spawned a new subgenre, the
narcocorrido, using the same grassroots lexicon that creates terms like
narcopolicia and narcopolitico.

Groups like Los Tigres del Norte, Los Huracanes and Los Dinamicos del Norte
have ridden a wave of success with narcocorridos carrying such titles as
``Contraband of Juarez,'' ``Terrible AK47,'' ``Partners of the Mafia,''
``The Cellular Phone'' and ``Sacred Cargo.''

Like rap music in the United States, narcocorridos have been widely
criticized in Mexico as a bad influence on society.

``Narcocorridos are a horrible perversion of Mexican culture,'' said Rene
Villanueva, a prominent music historian and a member of Los Folkloristas, a
band that has played traditional regional Mexican music, including
corridos, since the 1960s.

``They are a sign of how the power of money amid poverty has diverted
people's interest to the most vulgar aspects of our society.''

In two northwest Mexican states, Chihuahua and Sinaloa, government
officials have banned narcocorridos from the airwaves, and many individual
stations elsewhere do the same.

``This sort of music glorifies criminal behavior and should be banned
everywhere,'' said Marta Rocha de Diaz, a Tijuana housewife who is Mexico's
answer to C. Delores Tucker, the American antirap crusader.

In California, however, there have been no protests, says Vicente Romero,
program director of KRAYFM, a popular station in Salinas that plays
ranchera and other Spanishlanguage music for the area's large Mexican
population.

``Maybe Los Tucanes and the other narcocorridos are a bad influence, but we
have to play them because everybody asks for them, and no one complains,''
he said.

Narcocorridos arouse less antipathy than rap perhaps because they have a
much lighter touch. In fact, their only similarity with rap is that they
glorify drugs and violence. They lack the dark, brooding aggressiveness of
much rap music, and some songs manage to make drug trafficking seem almost
charming.

``We don't invent anything,'' said Quintero in an interview after the King
City concert. ``Drugs are simply part of life. If you prohibit them, people
will like them more.''

One of the most controversial aspects of Los Tucanes' songs is that some of
their lyrics read as if they might have been written and paid for by drug
lords or drug gangs themselves.

For example, the group's song about ``El Guero'' (Whitey) Palma, a Sinaloa
drug lord now serving time in Mexico's highsecurity Almoloya prison, calls
him ``a respectable gentleman'' and concludes in a warning to police:

``Don't go over the line, because the king isn't dead. . . . Don't sleep
soundly. The orders are the same, and will be carried out to the letter.
Even your pillow could explode on you.''

Although accepting commissioned songs would fit the grass roots tradition
of corridosforhire, Quintero will admit only to taking suggestions. He
denies taking money to turn them into songs.

``We just sing about what we've seen or what people tell us. For example,
La Pinata is real. The big guys do these things. I've seen it.''

Really? he was asked, a drug lord's cocaine party?

Quintero coughed nervously. ``No, no, I mean someone told me about it.''

In the past year, Los Tucanes have broken through into the market of
central and southern Mexico, where nortena music has traditionally been
ignored.

Next, they are planning to spread their message through Central and South
America. The band plans a tour to Colombia in January a country with
plenty of drug trafficking but where the dominant local music styles,
cumbia and vallenato, generally steer clear of drug themes.

``There's lots of material in Colombia, right?'' Quintero said, grinning.
``And nobody there is doing the subject. We've got the field wide open."