The rise of Narco-Rap in Mexico

LeChef Borderland Beat from CTGN

Singing rap songs that glorify gangsters has become a top new beat in Mexico. The musical dedications to mobsters pay well but come with a high price to your future.

Correspondent Alasdair Baverstock reports on the rise of Narco-Rap.

As Mexico’s deadly drug war continues, the Mexican government has announced that more than 33,000 residents were killed in 2018. It’s a record number. And it’s the result of competing cartels fighting for a market worth billions of dollars every year.

There’s another market important to them as well. The desire for good Public Relations has led narco-traffickers to recruit some of the best talent to speak out - or “sing out” - on their behalf.

Chivis: more from BuzzFeed

When Big Los was deported from Texas to the Mexican border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in 2015, he was worried.

He’d released a rap track a few months before, “Alto Calibre,” boasting of the exploits of the Chilango, an incarcerated member of the Gulf Cartel. The man behind bars had been a major figure in the Mexican city of Reynosa, which is roughly 50 miles inland from Matamoros. The two cities have long been bastions of factions of the Gulf Cartel, and while those groups sometimes get along, they sometimes don’t.

From Big Los's "Alto Calibre"

Ruje un pinche Corvette ZR1 / se bajá él chilango anda armado hasta él culo / Bien paletoso trae un reloj julbo / Con la pinche super dice ábranse o los fumo.

[A fucking Corvette ZR1 engine roars / The Chilango steps out armed to the teeth / Real dapper, wearing a flossed-out watch / With the fucking gat he says, "Open up or I’ll smoke you."]

Big Los is a recognizable figure, known as much for his gruff voice and gun-toting music videos as his massive physique, reminiscent of Big Pun or the Notorious B.I.G. After arriving in Matamoros, Big Los immediately felt he’d be a target for the rival clique who controlled the city, so he said he called someone connected to the cartel, “a friend of a friend.”

“I told him, ‘I don’t feel comfortable in the streets, man, everyone seems to know me,’” said Big Los in February. “‘I don’t want to get picked up because I did a song for a certain guy over there. And there’s an internal war between you guys.’”

The rapper was no stranger to Matamoros: He’d actually been born there before his family illegally migrated across the border to Brownsville, Texas, when he was a child. As a teenager, growing up in a rough part of Brownsville, he sold drugs and eventually ended up in jail. After release, he found rap music, and used it as a way to leave the streets. (He was deported to Mexico in 2015 after he tried to apply for US citizenship.)

While many rap artists look at the money and fame that comes from their music as an escape from the hardships of their lives, narco rap is an exception. The primary feature of the Spanish-language hip-hop subgenre is that drug cartel members pay rappers to make songs about their lives, called “dedications,” thus actually inviting hardship in. Big Los, one of the pioneers of narco rap, admits he regularly gets death threats via social media from people claiming to be contrarios — members of enemy cartels.

Starting in the ’80s and ’90s, artists combined the accordion-filled traditional corrido genre with this practice of telling boastful tales of drug traffickers in Mexico, and narcocorridos are still wildly popular today. However, in the last decade, a modernization of the practice has flourished in rap music, specifically concerning the Gulf Cartel along the Texas-Tamaulipas border, in tandem with cartel infighting and the Mexican government’s crackdown on gang violence and drugs. And now narco rap is spreading rapidly to other criminal groups throughout Mexico, like the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, and the MS-13 in El Salvador. It’s also cropped up in Spanish-speaking communities in the US with narco rap songs delivered in English for the Latin Kings in Chicago and the Sureños in Los Angeles.

Big Los made it clear he isn’t a member of the Gulf Cartel, nor does he actually know the majority of the people he makes songs about. He receives messages through social media or text message explaining what the people want him to say about them; he checks that the songs have been approved by cartel bosses; then he makes the tracks for a fee.

And as one of the biggest-name narco rappers in the biz, Big Los makes the most money per song: around $5,000, and another $5,000 per video. Rapper 5050 (pronounced in the Spanish Cincuenta Cincuenta) charges $500. Lirik Dog, a Reynosa-based narco rapero, told me, “I’m one of the cheap ones,” charging $200 per dedication.