Is It Cool To Enjoy Narco Culture?

When there are 30,000 murders a year in Mexico and 100,000 overdose deaths in the U.S.

When I was filming a docu-series about the legendary Sinaloa singer Chalino Sánchez in 2022, I interviewed a current corrido star in a studio in Los Angeles. Before we got the cameras rolling, he described how the drug lord El Mencho had reached out to him via an envoy to ask how much he charged to write a drug ballad.

Unable to refuse such a request, the singer said he charged forty-thousand dollars, thinking the kingpin might turn that down. Mencho came back saying he would commission two songs - one for him and one for a prized gunman who deserved a reward. The singer whipped out his phone and played me the corrido he had recorded for Mencho.

The fact that many narco corrido singers get paid by narcos is no secret. In Sinaloa, up-and-coming artists will openly offer the price they charge for a ballad. The songs can flatter the subject about how brave they are, how many gunfights they have had and how much dope they move. “High powered rifles, lots of money in my pockets…they used to send me kilos, now they send me tons,” it says in the song “El Indio” by the unsubtly named Grupo Cartel.

Corridos are a way to cement the status of gangsters within their eco system. “For the narcos, getting a ballad about them is like getting a doctorate,” Conrado Lugo, a corrido producer in Culiacan once told me.

For the musicians it means that they actually have a source of income unlike a lot of artists. Bands also play at private parties of traffickers for up to six figures although this can mean staying awake for days of cocaine-fueled dancing. An accordion player described how the brother of El Chapo, “El Guano,” once ordered him to play the same tune thirteen times in a row. 

Rather than turning listeners off, the close proximity between singers and sicarios is part of the attraction. Corridos sound dangerous because they talk about real drug deals and real murders which makes them more threatening if you blast them in your truck. And they are genuinely catchy and enjoyable tunes that have become immensely popular, not just in Mexico but in the United States, across Latin America and beyond.

The authentic gangster connection puts the corrido scene into an ethical grey area. How cool is it to profit off narco culture when the gangsters are unleashing a bloodbath in Mexico and trafficking chemicals that kill over a hundred thousand a year in the United States? Are narco corridos part of the problem in encouraging youngsters to join cartel death squads or become mules slipping dope over the border? Would repressing them help reduce the violence?

Mexico has been wrestling with these questions for decades. Radio stations largely refuse to play drug ballads. However, this has been undermined by YouTube and streaming services where they score hundreds of millions of listens. Peso Pluma, who sings ballads about Sinaloa Cartel characters as well as love songs, is in the top fifty worldwide on Spotify. Some Mexican states have banned shows of narco corridos. Meanwhile, a mayor was caught on video singing a corrido about El Chapo.

Narco culture, however, has grown much bigger than the musicians in Stetson hats plucking twelve-stringed guitars in Sinaloa salons. The dilemma reaches the heights of media platforms with Latin American narco novelas from Queen of the South to Lord of the Skies as well as the Netflix hits Narcos, El Chapo and Griselda reaching a worldwide audience.

What’s more, there is a whole genre of computer games in which you run around the narco world with AK’s with names such as “Call of Juarez: The Cartel.” YouTube monetizes endless videos on the travails of traffickers, and “Popeye,” a former hit man of Pablo Escobar had his own channel before he was rearrested and died in prison. Entertainment becomes a late career option for “reformed” gangsters.

VH1 even had a reality show called Cartel Crew with families of narcos including the son of Griselda Blanco and a guest appearance from El Chapo’s wife Emma Coronel in a slinky dress sipping cocktails in a yacht. (Coronel also has her own clothing brand).

Perhaps humans have always loved outlaws from Robin Hood to John Dillinger. Gangster rap sold millions of records and “The Godfather” is one of the most popular movies Hollywood ever made. And people have followed the mythologized chronicles of wars going back to the Iliad.

But there is a particular fascination with the larger-than-life narcos right now. And there is a notion that we can treat them as entertainment that we don’t extend to Russian paramilitary leaders or Taliban fighters.

How much of what we get is important information and when does it cross the line into pure sensation? And again, is narco culture actually a factor behind the violence that has to be challenged if the Mexican Cartel War is ever going to end?

Singing What They See?

Researching gangs in Honduras, I asked people when the street crews became really dangerous. Several gave me the same answer – it was about the time the movie “Blood In Blood Out” came out. Before then, the gangs looked like characters in the Michael Jackson “Bad” video. After the 1993 film was a sensation in Honduras they dressed and acted like its cholo protagonists. There was even a Honduran gang named Vatos Locos after the fictional crew; it controls chunks of territory in San Pedro Sula to this day.

I found this answer disconcerting. Translated into Spanish as “Sangre Por Sangre” the movie set in Los Angeles is a brilliant cautionary tale in which two of the gang members end up crippled. Yet it still inspires some viewers to be like those it portrays. Oliver Stone made “Platoon” as an anti-war movie but it enthuses youths to join the army.

Of course, most people in most places don’t watch gangster films and become gangsters. There are other more significant causes at play. Deportees brought gang culture from Los Angeles to Central America. Kids left behind by desperate migrants found solace in gangs. Firearms trafficked from the United States turned knife fights into gun fights. Yet the changing culture was surely a factor in the mix.

Likewise, narco corridos are no way the biggest cause of Mexico’s cartel war. American drug demand provides the billion-dollar market. Corruption allows cartels to flourish. Youths without hope are cannon fodder for crime armies. But the overwhelming narco culture does make it all seem normal, even inevitable, that certain children will become the next generation of killers.

I don’t like coming to this conclusion. I am against censoring any songs or series. I instinctively prefer to point to structural factors rather than cultural ones. The defense of corrido writers, like that of gangster rappers, is that they are reporting the tough reality they see and I am sympathetic to that. Yet to be honest, I don’t think that narco culture only reflects reality but also rebounds to shape it.

I grew up in the eighties blasting punk rock and hip hop at a time when conservative voices said they were a bad influence and tried to censor them. They failed. That battle was part of what can be called the Culture War 1.0, which was the unsuccessful attempt of social conservatives to stop a society becoming more socially liberal, especially when it came to sex. (The sexually-explicit rap group 2 Live Crew was one of those targeted). 

We are now in what could be called Culture War 2.0 with new battles raging over language and identity. During the upheaval in 2020, there were successful calls to kill cop shows for a negative portrayal of black people. (Even “Paw Patrol” came under fire for sugar-coating cops).

But while culture issues are so dominant and divisive, the narco war is seen as more neutral terrain that can be enjoyed. The trial of El Chapo in 2019 made daily splashes across cable shows with lurid stories like that of the drug lord jumping from his lover’s bed to run naked through a tunnel. A TV reporter in the court house remarked to me how it was a light relief from politics in the Trump era.

Yet Mexican reporters covering the case were soberer, being close to the mass graves and massacres the accused had unleashed. Likewise, families of victims can be understandably enraged by the glorification of narcos.

“It angers me how people make these criminals into heroes without thinking about the harm they are doing,” said Mirna Nereyda Medina, whose son was murdered and buried in a clandestine grave.

The Evasive Mexican Hero Cop

In 2010, then public security secretary Genero García Luna paid a TV network about $10 million to make a novela called “El Equipo” about an elite-squad of federal police hitting drug traffickers. It was an attempt to shift the culture and create cop heroes to compete with narcos. But it was full of cringy writing and didn’t catch on. And anyone who knows the name García Luna will point out that he was himself convicted of trafficking drugs in 2023.

It’s notable how there are few successful portrayals of heroic Mexican cops. A key reason is that many officers in Mexico are indeed corrupt and violent and it can be tough to get audiences to cheer for them. One of the most memorable depictions of a good Mexican cop was in the movie “Traffic,” played by a Puerto Rican and made by an American director.  

American cop protagonists are of course a mainstay of U.S. fiction and are projected onto other countries. The first season of Narcos made the DEA agents the heroes rather than Pablo Escobar himself.

In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who is a former marketing executive, has promoted an image of hero cops and soldiers, praising them in videos as “héroes de la patria.” And he has demonized the gang members, who he calls terrorists.   

There could eventually be a Mexican leader who tries to shift the culture like this. Or perhaps there will be a more socially-orientated approach that changes the culture, and lives, of the poor youths being recruited. Or maybe the glorification of Mexico’s narcos will shift eventually of its own accord.

In the meantime, those of us who cover the drug trade can try and do it gracefully, providing as much solid info as we can and showing the terrible with the excess. To answer the original question, yes, I think it is okay to enjoy narco culture albeit with an understanding of the pain that has been unleashed by the cartel war. I used to think a true-to-life narco series would have to show the real suffering from the murders and mass graves.

But then most people don’t want to see that on TV. They want to see good-looking people and sex and violence. TV is aspirational. Even when the directors might not want it to be. Scarface or Goodfellas won’t be cautionary tales for everyone. Some viewers want to be those guys.

Top photo by Fernando Brito as produced in my book El Narco, 2011.

Text copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2024