“What we do is music and we only please. Thank you very much again for this support. And we are glad to please them. You will know if you sing it and say more or less like that,” says Armando Moreno, vocalist of the joy of the ravine. The first concordeon notes sound on the stage in the municipality of Tequila, in Jalisco. The confetti explodes on the stage and the screen behind the band melts to Blanco. Giant black lyrics begin to appear that the public begins to sing, as in a karaoke: “I am the owner of the palenque. Four letters are in front.” To this modality to skip the prohibition to the narcocorridos, which happened on May 4 during a group of the group, the users on the Internet and those who were present that night, they baptized him as a “Mega narcokaraoke “.
The Sinaloense group did not sing a single lyrics of the song The palenquewhich glorifies Nemesio Oseguera, aka The Mencholeader of the Jalisco New Generation poster (CJNG); nor when he interpreted 701dedicated to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapoformer leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Alfredo Olivas did the same last week when playing The bad of Culiacán. He let his audience sing “out of respect” to the national suggestion against issues that apologize to violence, although in Monterrey no sanctions have been established against the corridos.
Those who did not have the same fate were other referents of the genre, such as Natanel Cano and Junior H. the so -called pioneer From the runs lying, he tried to challenge the prohibition at the San Marcos Fair, in Aguascalientes, when starting with songs that mention the narco, the Sinaloa cartel and the faction of the Chapitos. The organizers turned off the microphone and speakers. The same happened with the Guanajuato singer, who also cut the sound during his presentation at the same event when he tried to interpret The eldest son, who refers to Édgar Guzmán López, son of the Chapo.
In another case, Luis Conríquez refused to sing narcocorridos during his performance in the Texcoco palenque, in Mexico, for the prohibition in that entity. The concert ended in Trifulca, with chairs flying towards the center of the stage and the singer’s musical team and his band completely shattered.
The social and political turbulence in which the narcocorrido began began at the end of March, when the joyful of the ravine projected images that exalted Mencho and the Chapo during a presentation in Guadalajara. One hour from the place, just over a month, the finding of the Izaguirre Ranch, in Teuchitlán, where allegedly the CJNG kidnapped, tortured and murdered people was made public. The group’s concert came when the shock for the finding was still fresh in collective memory.
A political order measure
When the United States, a fundamental market for gender, took the visa with the cheerful ones, some artists went out to uncheck the runs lying down and others kept silent so as not to be the following. Since then, it has been a spiral for different singers and bands of the genre, who have faced censorship and look before a possible scenario in which narcoculture can face criminal sanctions and even the prohibition.
Luis Omar Montoya, historian specializing in music of the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), mentions that the current moment of the corridos and their variants is unpublished, at least at the scale in which he is ascending, with Aguascalientes, Michoacán, Nayarit, Quintana Roo, Chihuahua, Jalisco and Baja California Its laws.
“It is clear to me that the governments of the states have been paying this initiative to prohibit narcoproid voter.
But the prohibition and criminal sanctions not only come from the states, they have also emerged as federal proposals by the ruling and opposition. Initiatives such as the deputy of Morena, Arturo Ávila Anaya; which proposes prison sentences for crime apology in corridos, films, series and video games. Or that of the legislator Marcelo Torres Cofiño, of the PAN, which contemplates various regulatory mechanisms that seek to eradicate the access to content that has as a boastful intention to the crime and the criminals.
Ainhoa Vásquez, author of the book Narcocultura (Paidós2024), affirms that what the prohibition brings is this type of violence as what happened in Texcoco with Conríquez and the reaction of the people. “We are talking about people who have a lot of prohibitions. Then, that you also come to ban the run generates a lot world, ”he complements.
Boom north of the border and anger
Today, according to Luminate reports and the United States record association, Latin music revenues exceeded one billion dollars in revenues per third consecutive year. Within this registry, the Mexican regional leads this growth and is already the largest subgenre in the US market. After Bad Bunny, Weight Feather, Strength Régida and Junior H are the most popular Latin artists in that country, with more than 100 million views, among the four, during the first semester of 2024.
However, despite this rise from the runs, the Ciesas specialist sees a crisis in the composition that has contributed to the exaltation of violence. “It is very simple. It is gross, it is not fine. I give as an example Paulino Vargas, who had a very fine narrative, I would say even very intellectual. That generation of composers died and there was no replacement, a succession. That also explains what is happening today, with a very strong, very strident discourse that bothers society and power,” he says.
What Montoya claims to the genre is his anger in the friendship, a subgenre that Chalino Sánchez, the legendary Sinaloense who sang to life hard on both sides of the border, popularized when he was imprisoned in the eighties. He dedicated himself to making compositions for inmates and charging for the runs. So, it is a job on which pure benefits of a character in question are said. “There is no longer a corrido of political criticism, for example, because within the narco run there was a line of political criticism. For example, I think of Teodoro Bello, La Granja, Los Tigres del Norte, who have a political treatment, a questioning of power and a social analysis,” he says.
What must also be said, according to the historian, is that the run, as a cultural product, has co -opted by drug cartels, because they have economic power and “now is their toy.” “It is clear to me that these organizations have a vision and make politics through the runs. Then, the corrido and narcocorrido have been taken by organized crime because they have understood that from there they can do politics and that it is a very important platform that reaches millions of people, from where they can also model a social vision, a social representation of themselves. We are facing a super interesting sociological and linguistic phenomenon.”
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