Mexico-U.S. drug wars: don’t blame the music

Military police in Ciudad Juarez (Image by Getty Images North America via Daylife)

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton was in Mexico for a summit about the country’s out-of-control drug violence.

While there, the U.S. Secretary of State received an earful about the U.S. role in supplying the guns and the money that are helping to fuel this problem (via the sale of cocaine, weed, and meth to deep-pocketed U.S. consumers).

In the days before she arrived, Mexican telecom and media billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego urged that the two governments consider legalization and regulation of illegal drugs as one way to stem the violence. So did U.S.-based drug policy watchdog groups.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based drug policy alliance, said: “The best gift that Secretary Clinton Could deliver to the Mexicans would be to break the taboo open on honest consideration of all drug policy options.”

Of course an end to prohibition, even of marijuana (which accounts for a good amount of the cartels’ cash flow), wasn’t really discussed. Clinton instead promised to throw more cash at the problem, more surveillance hardware, etc. Though she did make a point of saying that “institution-building” had to be part of it, and that the United States and Mexico should work with civilian groups to shore up the rule of law.

At least she didn’t lash out against narcocorridos. Everyone else has. This musical genre popular first in northern Mexico but now elsewhere too consists of ballads popularizing the exploits of cartels and their enforcers. Earlier this year, Mexico governing conservative party suggested that musicians who pen ballads celebrating drug violence should get jail time. And radio stations have been slapped with a law banning narcocorridos from the airwaves.

Though it seems like a draconian idea, the censorship of narcocorridos and the bands that play them has become an accepted fact in Mexico.

Earlier this month wire service Ansa carried a story based on a book by prominent Mexican journalist Diego Osorno, in which he describes how the cartels use narcocorridos for propaganda purposes, to legitimize the cartels’ role in Mexican society and recruit impressionable youth into their networks.

Even the iconic and widely admired Los Tigres del Norte have been pulled into the fray over narcocorridos.

I feel tremendously for what Mexico has been going through. But I am skeptical of efforts to “Jail the Messenger” as blog The Mex Files puts it. Popular music has always been tied up with underworlds of one sort or another, from the tango’s early days as brothel music, to Colombia’s countrified vallenato genre beloved by drug bosses, to jazz’s associations with Prohibition-era speakeasies. Not to mention hip-hop and inner city gangs.

Censorship of criminal inroads into pop culture doesn’t get at the root of the problem. Neither does waging “wars” against a basic problem of supply, demand and an inevitable criminal black market. This market and its attendant violence that rots at the rule of law will exist, somewhere, for as long as wealthy consumers create a huge market for illegal narcotics.

Journalist Elijah Wald, a music expert who wrote a book on narcocorridos, maintains a website with a helpful time-line of efforts to censor the music.