Who Is Killing Mexico’s Musicians?
Who Is Killing Mexico’s Musicians?
By IOAN GRILLO/MEXICO CITY
Since the 1990s, popular Mexican singers have been increasingly crooning about Kalashnikovs and cocaine alongside their traditional ballads of hard work and lost love. Take “Contraband in the Border” by Valentin Elizalde, one of the thousands of drug ballads or narco corridos that are played in cantinas and parties from the mountains of Mexico to the immigrant ghettos of Los Angeles. “There was a big shoot-out/With 14 bullet-filled bodies/And the American government,/took away the marijuana” go the lyrics, as tubas and accordions drone out the melody to the rhythm of a German polka. In November 2006, gunmen ambushed and killed Elizalde and took out his manager and driver while injuring his cousin outside a cockfighting ring in the border city of Reynosa.
Elizalde’s murder is not an isolated incident. Singers have not just been chanting about the bloody drug violence ravaging their country; they have also been among its most prominent victims. [more]