In a black SUV with tinted home windows, lawyer Mariel Colón arrives on the gates of a distant villa, passing a safety guard facet by facet with Emma Coronel, the spouse of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Wearing tracksuits and sun shades, the pair enter a dimly lit room crammed with sharply dressed males smoking cigars.
All to the sound of trumpets.
The scene is from “La Señora,” the most recent music video from Colón, who spent a number of years working as a protection legal professional for Guzmán as he confronted trial in a U.S. court docket. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music is changing into a world phenomenon, the 31-year-old is leveraging her affiliation with the previous Sinaloa Cartel chief to launch her music profession below the stage identify “Mariel La Abogada ” (Mariel, the Lawyer).
“La Señora” options — and pays homage to — Guzmán’s spouse, who was launched from jail final 12 months and has struggled to seek out work. It paved the way in which for the 2 to indicate collectively final weekend throughout Milan Fashion Week, elevating eyebrows in Italy and past.
“(My work) opens doorways for me due to the morbidity, the curiosity of individuals… They wish to perceive it,” Colón informed The Associated Press. “I at all times informed those that Mariel is a singer turned lawyer.”
The Puerto Rican daughter of a music director grew up listening to Mexican ballads, loving the damaged ardour infused within the music. She at all times needed to be a singer, however her household pushed her to get a regulation diploma.
She started working for Guzmán’s protection crew in 2018, after graduating from regulation college within the United States and coming throughout an advert on Craigslist searching for a part-time paralegal to assist put together a Spanish-speaking consumer for the method.
It was solely later that he realized he could be working with Guzmán, taking him and Coronel as full-time purchasers. He noticed it as a “nice skilled alternative” and stated he was not simply intimidated.
Once among the many most needed males on this planet, Guzmán led his Sinaloa Cartel in a bloody warfare to manage the worldwide drug commerce, incomes a cinematic degree of notoriety for his dramatic jail breaks earlier than his extradition to the United States in 2017. Now his sons, referred to as “Los Chapitos,” are engaged in a lethal energy wrestle with one other cartel faction, leaving mutilated our bodies within the state capital.
“(People ask) how can I do that job, that I’m a part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night time?” Colon stated. “I do not care what they are saying about me. I sleep very properly at night time.”
Colón is without doubt one of the few individuals who keep common contact with Guzmán. She visits him 3 times a month within the most safety jail in Colorado the place he’s serving a life sentence. He declined to debate particulars of Guzmán’s circumstances, citing attorney-client privilege.
Seeking to construct rapport, Colón sings for Guzmán and different purchasers, together with different Mexican drug traffickers and, for a short time, Jeffrey Epstein, who dedicated suicide in 2019 whereas awaiting trial on intercourse trafficking prices .
Colón serenades Guzmán with Mexican classics from bands together with Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana. To at the present time, he stated, he’s among the many first to listen to his new music.
“Whatever the style, no matter was popping out that I appreciated, I might sing it to him as a result of he does not have a radio,” he stated.
His music profession started simply over a 12 months in the past, when he launched his first video, “La Abogada,” wherein Colón wearing a pink costume croons to regulation enforcement from a courtroom. Like a lot of the style, its music is various, starting from the percussion-heavy banda to the character-focused ballads referred to as corridos.
“La Señora” incorporates a desk strewn with diamonds, Guzmán’s spouse astride a trotting horse and strolling by a pool.
Colón stated the track was based mostly on Coronel’s life, sending a message of redemption and second probabilities. It was additionally a strategy to provide the 35-year-old a job, a situation of her testing.
Coronel, a former magnificence queen, was launched from jail final 12 months after serving her three-year sentence for drug trafficking and cash laundering in connection along with her husband’s drug empire. Coronel declined to be interviewed.
“A small waist and exquisite eyes. A mind for enterprise and a powerful voice for the dangerous boys. He simply exhibits his affectionate facet to El Chaparrito,” Colón sings in his ballad. “El Chaparrito,” which means “the little dachshund,” performs on Guzmán’s nickname.
Colón’s musical rise coincides with a relative golden age of Mexican music, which has grown 400% worldwide previously 5 years on Spotify. In 2023, Mexican artist Peso Pluma beat Taylor Swift as probably the most streamed artist on YouTube.
While corridos have dominated for greater than a century, younger artists have stuffed stadiums with a twist on the type, mixing traditional ballads with lure in corridos tumbados.
But it additionally goes to the center of a bigger debate: Does the music seize the truth that many Mexicans face, or does it glorify the narco-violence that has lengthy plagued the Latin American nation?
Drug trafficking tradition has lengthy been a part of corridos, with many singers idealizing traffickers as “an bold determine who goes in opposition to the system,” stated Rafael Saldívar, a researcher on the Autonomous University of Baja California.
“They are cultural expressions that talk to the realities of the nation,” Saldívar stated. But “they type of glorify these criminals, or they do it in such a means that some really feel prefer it’s pushing this sort of life-style.”
A traditional instance: corridos king Chalino Sánchez used the violence round him in Sinaloa to spin lyrics and on the identical time denounce the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocents. He was shot and killed throughout a present on the state capital in 1992.
Last 12 months, Peso Pluma – which paid tribute to Guzmán in track – was pressured to cancel a present in Tijuana after the 25-year-old obtained threats from a Sinaloa Cartel rival that if he got here “it might be your final efficiency . ”
Tijuana later banned the efficiency of drug ballads altogether to guard the “eyes and ears” of younger folks because it tries to comprise the violence. Local authorities in northern states had beforehand banned musicians from singing narcocorridos.
Colón, who has not gone as far as to glorify weapons or medicine, is fast to defend the narcocorridos.
“There’s a purpose why Netflix made the present ‘Narcos,’ it is as a result of there’s an viewers for it. It makes folks curious,” he stated. “That doesn’t suggest they applaud or have fun what this individual has completed, however they’ve some kind of admiration for this individual or their life. Not all the pieces is violence. These folks have a coronary heart, they’ve a household.”
While Colón plans to launch her first album in December, Coronel used “La Señora” to launch her profession as a mannequin and social media influencer.
April Black Diamond, the designer who requested Coronel and Colón to mannequin at a facet occasion throughout Milan Fashion Week, stated her selection was met with “shock.”
“People evolve. My platform is just not about judgment however about displaying the totally different dimensions of girls, their energy and resilience,” she wrote in a word. The subsequent day, photographs of Coronel sporting one of many designer’s clothes appeared on a billboard in Times Square in New York.
On Wednesday, the National Chamber of Italian Fashion issued an “pressing” press launch saying that the present was not affiliated with official style week occasions and that manufacturers should observe its code of ethics.
Meanwhile, eyes on Colón and Coronel’s video proceed to develop, clocking up round 750,000 views on YouTube.
