Sunday, 23 August 1998


Radio embraces corridos that make heroes of drug runners

By Tim Steller
The Arizona Daily Star

The day after Tucson police announced they were searching for a suspected hit man from Mexico, a local Spanish-language radio station played a song praising his brother, ``El Culichi de Sonora.''
El Culichi, the song recounted, escaped from prison in Nogales, Sonora, by killing a guard.
On April 18, 1997, ``a day that will live in history,'' 100 police officers surrounded El Culichi's house in Hermosillo and exchanged gunfire with the murder suspect, eventually killing him.
``He knew that he was going to die, but that didn't matter to him,'' Fabian Gomez sings. ``Rather, he stuck to his ideals: `I'm not going back to prison.' ''
Songs about drug traffickers have grown popular across the U.S.-Mexico border region since the mid-1970s, but until recently they were almost absent from Tucson airwaves.
Six months ago, KTZR 1450 AM, known as Radio Pantera, started a ``corridos'' program that includes songs about traffickers. The show started with a bang.

Familiar sounds

``If you don't listen,'' one promotion warned, ``there will be a settling of accounts.'' Then gunshots sounded.
The sound of automatic weapons is familiar to corrido fans. Many of the songs that host Luis Aguilar plays include police shouting over loudspeakers and gunfire during re-enactments of real-life conflicts.
``They're all the same,'' Aguilar said, interviewed during his 10 p.m. show last week. ``They buy, they sell, they distribute, and they get thrown in prison.''
Some die violently, as in the case of El Culichi, a native of Santa Ana, Sonora, whose real name was Ulises Villagrana Salazar. Tucson police arrested one of his brothers, Rene, in July and are pursuing another brother, Cesar, in connection with a kidnapping here.
Cesar Villagrana also is suspected of organizing an ambush and shootout that killed three people in Santa Ana on April 27.

Some are traditional

Not all corridos are about drug trafficking, and the songs played during Aguilar's hour-long show touch on more traditional themes. Some describe a betrayed love; others, a good horse.
The musical form developed more than a century ago and flourished during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution, said Luis Astorga, a sociologist at Mexico City's Autonomous University. Since Mexico lacked mass communications at the time, musicians passed on news about the revolution through the songs.
The corrido ``is oral history put to music,'' Astorga said.
The sort of accompaniment can vary - from the big brass ``banda'' sound to a simple accordion, guitar and 12-string ``bajo sexto.'' But the form of the songs is repetitive, as in bluesmusic.
Tales of drug traffickers first appeared in a corrido recorded in the 1940s, Astorga said. But it wasn't until the 1970s that the so-called ``narco corridos'' blossomed.
Groups like Los Tigres del Norte spread the songs through recordings.

Different perspective

``They exchanged the horse for pickups, like the Cheyenne, and they exchanged a pistol for the AK-47,'' Astorga said.
Unlike news of the revolution, the stories of drug traffickers' exploits often appear in news accounts before they come out in song. But the song's perspective is often quite different.
``It's the perspective of the underclass, of those who don't control the news media, and what they see in daily life,'' Astorga said. He is the author of the Spanish-language book ``Mythology of the Drug Trafficker in Mexico.''
Some corridos tell the stories of famous ``mafiosos'' like Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Rafael Caro Quintero. These usually celebrate the accomplishments and qualities of the men, stressing that they never ``se rajaron,'' or backed down.
These corridos usually don't come out until after the subjects have died or been imprisoned, because the big traffickers don't want such attention, Astorga said.

Wildly popular

Whether it's because corridos reflect an unspoken daily life or because they tell epic tales of ``traficantes,'' the songs are wildly popular.
Corrido recordings are the top sellers at Yoly's Music Shop, 3354 S. Sixth Ave., said Loreley Jacobo, who manages the store. Her brother, Paco, is the programming director for Radio Pantera as well as KOHT, 98.3 FM, and initiated the new show.
``The reason I'm playing the corridos with all the narcos and everything is that people ask for them,'' Paco Jacobo said. ``Nobody else plays them.''
And locally, nobody else has played them with consistency. Even before 1995, when Radio Pantera was owned by a father and son who used the station to launder drug money, they played few if any narco corridos.
Jacobo's programming changes, including the new corridos show, appear to be succeeding. The quarterly Arbitron ratings show Radio Pantera beating one competitor and keeping up with another.

Latest ratings up

In fall 1997, the station had the same share of the 12-and-over Tucson radio audience as its AM competition, KQTL: 0.7 percent. The latest ratings give Pantera a 2.1 percent share to KQTL's 1.3.
The FM competition - KZLZ 105.3, or ``La Zeta'' - grew its share from 1.3 percent last fall to 2.8 percent in the spring.
La Zeta plays programming broadcast via satellite from Sacramento, Calif., to stations throughout the country. Its shows include some narco corridos, as well as ``shock talk'' about sex and other topics.
KQTL, known as Radio Mundo, does not play narco corridos.
The reasons for boycotting the songs are obvious, said Ernesto Portillo, national sales manager for KQTL 1210 AM.
``We are very much against playing that kind of music,'' Portillo said. ``It's not conducive to anything socially beneficial.''
Over the years the songs have become more explicit about destructive behaviors, Astorga said.
``Before, it was more metaphorical, more indirect,'' he said. ``No longer do they hide the use of drugs, for example, and they speak a lot about the use of cocaine.''

Protesting a killing

A Tucson musician, Adalberto Gallegos, said singers should promote justice instead of glorifying outlaws. Gallegos wrote ``Cañon Mariposa,'' a corrido protesting the 1992 killing of border crosser Dario Miranda Valenzuela by Border Patrol Agent Michael Elmer.
Like ``gangsta rap,'' narco corridos desensitize listeners to gunfights and drug use, Gallegos said.
``The music is great, but I think people are listening more to the groove than to the lyrics. I think it's subliminally conditioning their minds,'' Gallegos said.
Aguilar, the disc jockey, likes to crank up the corridos and dance around the studio during his show, but he lowered the volume to explain he thinks the songs actually discourage imitation.
``They say that it's bad for kids to listen to corridos. I say they should listen. Nobody in these songs wins. They either die or they get thrown in jail,'' he said.

For rural listeners

Despite the doomed characters in the songs, Aguilar, known as El Piporro, fills the corrido hour with an infectious enthusiasm. He directs his show specifically to the ``picudos,'' the border region's men in cowboy boots, using the jargon he learned growing up in Nogales, Sonora.
Many listeners are incarcerated and like to hear songs about underworld characters they know, locals like El Culichi from Santa Ana, Aguilar said.
One inmate, nicknamed El Jabalín, wrote to request a corrido called ``Cuerno de Chivo,'' or ``goat horn'' - the slang term for an AK-47. Aguilar fulfilled the request.
Social concerns about corridos ``are not my problem,'' Paco Jacobo said. ``My problem is programming the station and getting the best numbers I can.''
Portillo, of KQTL, regrets that numbers seem to be what matter most.
``Everything is competition,'' Portillo said. ``There should be some responsibility.''

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Pacific News Service offers a look at narco-corrido music. Check out a San Francisco Chronicle story on narco-corrido. Writer Sam Quinones looks at narco-corrido's Los Angeles roots. The San Jose-based Los Tigres del Norte are leaders in the narco-corrido music trend. Understand the roots of corrido style from the Corridos sin Fronteras Web site at UCLA.


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