Colombia's Narco-Ballads

Songs Pay Tribute To Drug Traffickers And Warlords

(AP)  Music producers say the songs fill a cultural void in Colombia, where pop songs rarely stray from conventional themes of love.

And much like rap in the United States, the songs echo the dreams and frustrations of many in the country's impoverished underclass, said Alirio Castillo, producer of the "Forbidden Rhythms" albums.

"This music is biggest in the most marginalized regions, those places where the people have to live the daily misery of our country's problems," he said.

A song called "Thanks to the Coca" by the Brothers Pabon pays homage to the bush from which cocaine is made.

"I changed my crops from corn to poppies, and all the coffee I changed to coca. ... All I have is thanks to the coca," goes the song, which lists the money, luxuries, respect and beautiful women that come with cocaine trade.

This music was inspired by groups in Mexico, another nation plagued by drug violence. Those acts adapted traditional Mexican ballads into folk songs that chronicle the exploits of drug gangs. Pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s by singers like Chalino Sanchez, "narcocorridos" were distributed last year to school libraries in a music-history book and CD — sparking an uproar.

In Colombia, home to a four-decade-old civil war, drug ballads can sound like serenades to violence.

"I am out looking for a bastard to make good a debt he owes me, and when I kill him, the same ground he walks on today will be covered in blood," sing the Brothers Pabon.

At this concert, the largest ever organized in Bogota, the parking lot is dotted with the SUVs favored by the country's drug-traffickers.

Inside, waiters dart between tables, answering cries for rum from overweight men in cowboy hats and ponchos — accompanied by stunningly beautiful women.

With time, the music has evolved beyond drug trafficking to speak on the country's other problems — rampant political corruption and the droves of Colombians forced from home by violence.

There's even a song about the kidnapping of presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who just marked her fourth year in captivity by the leftist rebels.

In a case of life imitating art, one man left the far-right paramilitaries to become a composer, Castillo said. The young man has refused to publicly acknowledge his past as a paramilitary for fear former comrades or leftist rebels would kill him.

"He's now one of my best songwriters," said Castillo.