By Kate Linthicum, L.A. Times | Narcocorridos — or drug ballads — are more popular than ever in Mexico, where a new generation that came of age during the ongoing drug war has embraced songs that recount and often glamorize both the spoils and perils of organized crime. In a packed nightclub in Mexico City, hundreds of young people sang along as a band played a popular song narrating the life of a foot soldier for the Sinaloa drug cartel.
I like to work/ And if the order is to kill / You don’t question it.
And for those who misbehave/ There’s no chance to explain/ I throw them into the grave.
But the genre is increasingly under attack. About a third of Mexico’s states and many of its cities have enacted some kind of ban on the performance of songs about narcos in recent years, with violators subject to heavy fines and jail time.
Mexico City may be next. Mayor Clara Brugada said she plans to introduce a law that would bar the songs from being played at government events and on government property.
“We can’t be promoting violence through music,” she said.
The bans, which come amid President Trump’s hyper-focus on drug trafficking in Mexico, have sparked debates here about freedom of expression and state censorship and have raised provocative questions: Do narcocorridos merely reflect reality in a nation gripped by powerful drug gangs? Or do they somehow shape it?
Said Amaya, the organizer of Guitarrazos, the event at the nightclub in Mexico City where multiple singers performed narcocorridos last week, said government focus should be on improving security, not persecuting young musicians.
“If you change the reality, the music might change,” Amaya said. “But you’re not going to change the reality by censoring songs.”
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Go here to read more on this issue and about some of the bands that have been banned in the U.S.:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-much-mexico-banning-pop-100000437.html
Times special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-05-11/la-fg-mexico-narcocorrido-ban