Do corrido lyrics help capture drug traffickers? Deciphering an urban legend

Mexican authorities arrested Mario Alexander Gámez, “El Piyi,” one of the top hitmen for La Chapiza — as the armed wing of the Sinaloa Cartel is known — last Thursday in the Jardines de Santa Fe, north of Culiacán. He is a white-skinned man with a beard, and about 1.75 meters tall. This vague information that the police released after his arrest was important to decipher the identity of the criminal. The aura of mystery surrounding El Piyi sparked the interest of narcocorrido composers years ago. Federal sources have told the media in recent days that the songs that made mention of the cartel hitman helped direct the investigations to track him down. This newspaper has spoken with experts in the musical genre, who hold a more skeptical view of the weight that corridos can have in an intelligence operation.

Enigmatic criminals and popular heroes have been historical sources of inspiration for the corrido genre. El Piyi, a low-profile hitman but with significant influence in the Sinaloa Cartel, according to authorities, attracted some interest among corrido artists. The lyrics dedicated to Gámez portray him as a man loyal to the organization and close to high-ranking figures such as Néstor Isidro Pérez-Salas, “El Nini” — the head of security for the Los Chapitos faction of the cartel, led by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — who was captured in November in Culiacán. Corrido del Piyi, a song performed by Larry Hernández and Los Caimanes de Sinaloa, provides a sample of these lyrics: You’ll see me right next to Nini / I’ll never leave his side, to me he’s like a brother […] Nice to meet you, they call me El Piyi / And here we are, paying close attention to the orders of the boss Iván [Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, a son of El Chapo].

El Piyi’s arrest took place in the context of violence that has plunged Culiacán into chaos since September 9. The city has become the epicenter of a war between the two factions fighting for control of the Sinaloa Cartel — those loyal to Ismael “El Mayo Zambada” and Los Chapitos. In the last two weeks, 100 people have been killed in cartel violence in the state.

For Luis Omar Montoya, a historian specialized in music at Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), extracting information about a criminal through a corrido can be viable, but not decisive. “Of course it is possible that the information contained in the corridos can be used, but I definitely think it is unlikely that the Mexican army is going to depend solely on a corrido to capture someone,” he explains, underlining the importance of the violent context unleashed in Culiacán to understand El Piyi’s arrest.

Over the past week, several media outlets have reported that federal sources consulted by the Milenio newspaper relied on songs by musicians of the corridos tumbados genre, a currently fashionable variant that unites the traditional corrido with modern urban styles. Some of the big names of the subgenre, such as Peso Pluma, Roberto Laija, and Luis R. Conriquez, included references to El Piyi in their discography. An example of this is La People II, where he is linked to Jorge Humberto Figueroa-Benítez, “El 27,” another capo of the Sinaloa Cartel hitmen: We are going out to defend the son of the boss […] / 27 and Piyi, take care of the land, the family, and the elderly.

Although these lyrics reveal certain information, Montoya argues that the narrative of modern corridos “is very poor,” which makes him skeptical of the hypothesis of the corrido as a key tool in achieving an arrest. The historian points out that the lyrics could help to understand the playful side of the subject, and his tastes; but he says that this is blurred by the description of virtues that the composers associate with the different figures equally (“they all like women, weapons, and luxury cars,” he specifies).

Luis Díaz-Santana, a researcher from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (UAZ), has in various investigations discussed the “magnification” of the importance that, he says, many academic specialists have given to the lyrics of the corridos, forgetting the playful context in which they are consumed. “The corridos are spaces for fun, for letting off steam,” he tells EL PAÍS by phone. The musical genre has been closely linked to commissioned corridos, songs created at the request of an interested party, and in which the composer exalts the virtues of those providing the money. For Díaz-Santana, discerning between reality and fiction in the lyrics of the corridos can be a complicated task: “It would be a matter of carrying out a very in-depth investigation and, in any case, I don’t think we would achieve certainty in the result.”

Díaz-Santana has held conversations with composers from the border area between the United States and Mexico, a key territory for understanding the genre, which is closely linked to the culture of mestizaje. “Everything I have found in the field work with these musicians is that whenever they compose, they do so in absolute freedom, that they are never conditioned by external influences,” he explains. La People II, written by Roberto Laija, addresses the fulfilment of missions by hitmen in a superficial way, without going into detail. “Personally, I doubt that they were composed on commission. You can see that they are celebratory corridos, that the composer comes up with them in an absolutely personal way,” explains Díaz-Santana.

The UAZ researcher also highlights a certain lack of understanding toward the cultural segment through which the genre moves ― where references to stories of drug trafficking and violence are common ― and where the composers use their own codes: “Often [explicit lyrics] can seem aggressive, macabre. I feel that the importance of reading corridos to the letter has been magnified. When we see the lyrics in context, we realize that what at first seemed like aggression is more of a joke.”

El Piyi’s is not an isolated case. A few hours after the arrest of El Mayo Zambada, the singer El As de la Sierra released Pacífico triste, a song in which he narrated the capture of the Sinaloa Cartel capo. And criminal figures such as El Chapo Guzmán or Juan José Esparragoza, “El Azul,” also a member of the Sinaloa Cartel, have had songs written about them.

Díaz-Santana’s investigations go back many years. The researcher has studied corridos about the figure of Fred Gómez Carrasco, one of the great Chicano drug lords of the 1970s, who went from living in the rural areas of San Antonio to being one of the most notorious cartel capos, a very common story in the mythologization of the character. “The idea that is common to all the figures that become myths, the extreme contrast between childhoods that were very humble and becoming public figures of great authority, stands out. This contrast causes great pleasure in society, it is something that goes deep in the human spirit.”

The possible influence of corridos in the investigations leading to the arrest of El Piyi blurs what CIESAS researcher Montoya actually finds more interesting: the importance of corridos in the understanding of popular issues, as drug cartels use today’s urban corrido singers to establish a political platform. “[This situation] ends up corroborating that drug trafficking permeates everything; how it is embedded in all popular culture, how it is an omnipresent discourse, and how a sort of popular mythology is built around drug trafficking.”

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