“They can’t do anything to me. I’m dead.”
This story seems damned churlish after all that rock & roll has done for the drug trade. Our pal HCB commented in an email – “I'd get a new tour manager”
"If Mexico's drug gangs hated anything as much as cops, it was singers and reporters. Not singers in any slang sense of snitches or stool pigeons; they hated real, guitar-strumming, love-song-singing crooners. Fifteen singers were executed by drug gangs in just eighteen months, including the beautiful Zayda Pefia, the twenty-eight-year-old lead singer of Zayda y Los Culpables, who was gunned down after a concert; she survived, but the hit team tracked her to the hospital and blasted her to death [in 2007] while she was recovering from surgery. The young heartthrob Valentin Elizalde was killed [in 2006] by a barrage of bullets from an AK-47 just across the border from McAllen, Texas, and Sergio Gomez was killed [in 2007] shortly after he was nominated for a Grammy; his genitals were torched, then he was strangled to death and dumped in the street. What doomed them, as far as anyone could tell, was their fame, good looks, and talent; the singers challenged the drug lords' sense of their own importance, and so were marked for death.” – Christopher McDougall, Born to Run.
Click here for Sid
The secret word is Vicious
Is it not possible that these artists were, as many are, involved with illicit drugs? Only, in a highly unstable & violently place and time? Where a late payment or sign of disrespect could very well mean one's life?
ReplyDeleteSome of it seems a bit too personal for this to be about fame... it sounds more like people aren't willing to talk openly because of the violence, let alone talk to outsiders. & wikipedia says that Sergio Gomez was warned not to play the venue where he was kidnapped from before turning up dead the next day, tortured & then strangled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido
"Narcocorrido lyrics refer to particular events and include real dates and places. The lyrics tend to speak approvingly of illegal criminal activities such as murder, racketeering, extortion, drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and sometimes political protest due to government corruption."
Valentín Elizalde, wikipedia says of him, "Some of his songs were narcocorridos, and it appears he was murdered by drug trafficking gangs."
Zayda Peña Arjona is the real question... beautiful indeed, it does raise the question & concern, she doesn't appear to have been involved. Though her most popular song was about a failed relationship & titled Tiro de Gracia... a reference to an execution-style gunshot. She was being treated for a gunshot wound in the neck when the assassins returned & killed her with a shots to the heart & head.
It's 15 people compared to how many more who met similar fates and worse during that period of time? It seems like these are mostly people who got in too deep & the tragic result of this war on drugs. Point being, it doesn't seem that fame, good looks & talent are the only cause of these killings. It doesn't make the loss of life any less valid or meaningful, people are being killed & over what? The prohibition & trade of commodities... No, it's the drive for a market in the trade of blood money itself. That's what the prohibition policy is all about, creating an equitable murder market.