MEXICO CITY —
Lawyer Mariel Colón arrives in a black van with tinted windows to the doors of a remote mansion accompanied by Emma Coronel, the wife of the famous drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Dressed in tailored suits and dark glasses, they both walk towards a subtly lit room filled with elegant men smoking cigars.
All this amidst resounding trumpets.
It is a scene from “La Señora,” the most recent music video by Colón, who spent several years being Guzmán’s lawyer during his trial in a United States court. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music has become a global phenomenon, the 31-year-old is looking to capitalize on her relationship with the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel to launch her musical career under the stage name Mariel La Abogada. .
“The Lady” stars Guzmán’s wife — who was released from prison last year and has struggled to find work — and is also a tribute to her. The video opened the doors for both of them to parade last weekend at Milan Fashion Week, attracting attention in Italy and other parts of the world.
“I think that (my job) opens doors for me in the sense that people, out of morbidity, out of curiosity, want to interview me. They want to understand what is happening,” Colón told The Associated Press. “I always tell people that Mariel is a singer who became a lawyer.”
Puerto Rican and daughter of a musical director, Colón grew up listening to Mexican ballads, falling in love with the heartbroken passion injected into the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family pressured her to become a lawyer.
In 2018, she began working for Guzmán’s legal team after graduating from law school in the United States and coming across an ad on Craigslist seeking a paralegal to help a Spanish-speaking client prepare for his trial. .
It was later that he found out he would be working with Guzmán, who along with Coronel became full-time clients. Colón considered it a great opportunity on a professional level and stressed that he was not easily intimidated.
Once one of the most wanted men in the world, Guzmán led the Sinaloa cartel during its bloody war for control of international drug trafficking, achieving cinematic level of fame thanks to his spectacular prison escapes, until he was extradited. to the United States in 2017. Now his sons — known as “Los Chapitos” — are engaged in a lethal power dispute with another faction of the cartel, which has left mutilated bodies scattered throughout different parts of Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. .
“(People ask) how can I work in that, they tell me I’m part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night,” Colón declared. “I don’t care what they say about me. I sleep very peacefully.”
Colón is one of the few people who maintains regular contact with Guzmán. He visits him three times a month at the maximum security prison in Colorado where he is serving a life sentence. He refused to reveal details about Guzmán’s cases, arguing the confidentiality that exists between client and lawyer.
In an attempt to build a good relationship, Colón sings to Guzmán and other of his clients, who have included other Mexican drug traffickers and, briefly, the tycoon Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 while awaiting trial. on sex trafficking charges.
Colón sings to Guzmán some of the classics of regional Mexican music, including songs by Los Alegres del Barranco and Los Tucanes de Tijuana. To date, he acknowledged, he is one of the first to hear his new songs.
“Whatever genre it was, whatever came out that I liked, I would sing it to him because he doesn’t have a radio,” he commented.
Her musical career began a little over a year ago, when she released her first video, “La Abogada,” which shows Colón in a pink suit, singing to police officers from a courtroom. Like much of the musical genre, their music covers diverse styles, from banda to corridos.
In the video for “La Señora” you can see a table full of diamonds and Guzmán’s wife riding a trotting horse and walking along the side of a pool.
Colón noted that the song is based on Coronel’s life and is intended to send a message of redemption and second chances. It is also a way to offer the 35-year-old woman a job, one of the requirements for her to receive her conditional release.
Coronel, a former beauty queen, was released from prison last year after serving a three-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering in connection with her husband’s empire. Coronel declined to be interviewed.
“A small waist and beautiful eyes. Brain for business, strong voice for the crafty. “Just with the shorty it changes to affectionate mode,” sings Colón, calling Guzmán “El Chaparrito,” the meaning of his nickname “El Chapo.”
Colón’s musical rise coincides with the rise of Mexican music, which has grown 400% worldwide in the last five years on the streaming platform Spotify. In 2023, the Mexican Featherweight surpassed Taylor Swift in the number of views on YouTube, becoming the singer with the most.
Although corridos have dominated the Mexican music scene for more than a century, young artists have managed to fill large stadiums by giving the genre a twist, mixing classical ballads with electronic tones to create the so-called corridos tumbados.
But they are also in the middle of an old debate: Are they a reflection of the reality that many Mexicans face? Or do they glorify the drug violence that has engulfed the country for a long time?
Narcoculture has been part of corridos for years, and many singers have idealized drug traffickers, making them see them as “an aspirational figure that goes against an unestablished system,” said Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja. California.
“They are expressions of culture that speak of realities that are experienced in the country,” he added. But in some way “these criminals are being glorified and, by doing so, in some sense, one could think that this lifestyle is being encouraged.”
A classic example is the case of the king of corridos, Chalino Sánchez, who used the violence around him in the state of Sinaloa to write songs while denouncing the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocents. He was shot to death at the end of a presentation in Culiacán in 1992.
Last year, Peso Pluma — who pays tribute to Guzmán in some songs — was forced to cancel a performance in Tijuana after he received threats from a group rival to the Sinaloa cartel.
Shortly after, Tijuana banned ballads that advocated drug trafficking to protect the “eyes and ears” of young people, in an attempt to contain violence. Local authorities in Mexico’s northern states had previously banned the performance of narcocorridos.
Colón, who has not reached the point of glorifying weapons or drugs, was quick to defend narcocorridos.
“There’s a reason why Netflix produced the ‘Narcos’ show; It’s because there is an audience for it. “It is intriguing for the public,” he declared. “That doesn’t mean that they applaud or celebrate what this person did, but there is a kind of admiration for this person or their life. Not everything is violence. “These people have hearts, they have families.”
Although Colón plans to release his first album in December, Coronel has taken advantage of “La Señora” to launch his career as a model and social media influencer.
April Black Diamond, the designer who asked Coronel and Colón to walk in an event within the framework of Milan Fashion Week, said that her decision generated “commotion.”
“People evolve. “My platform is not about judging people, but about showing the different dimensions of women, their strength and their resilience,” she wrote in a statement. The next day, images of Coronel dressed in one of the designer’s creations appeared on a billboard in Times Square, New York City.
Italy’s National Chamber of the Fashion Industry issued an “urgent” press release on Wednesday stating that the show was not part of the official fashion week events and that brands must adhere to its code. of ethics.
Meanwhile, the video of Colón and Coronel continues to become popular and has already accumulated some 750,000 views on YouTube.
