Though there was no evidence to suggest the incident was anything other than an accident, suspicions lingered.
#COMPOSITOR DE CORRIDOS DRIVER#
on February 25, the police received a distress call: The Accord had been going too fast and its driver lost control and crashed, killing Camacho along with 24-year-old college student Julio Valverde, and 22-year-old Melina Durán, who left behind a young son.
After spontaneously jumping onstage with the brass banda Clave Azul to sing “El Karma” at the Carnaval Mocorito, a big fair less than an hour from his home, Camacho and four friends packed into a 1994 Honda Accord, itself nearly as old as its occupants. Like Sánchez, Camacho died in the night after singing at a show in Sinaloa. The next day he was found beside a ditch, shot twice in the back of the head. In 1992, Sánchez returned to his hometown to play a show.
Noted drug lord and prison escape artist “El Chapo” Guzmán sprang from its semi-arid land, as did the influential narcocorrido singer/songwriter Chalino Sánchez-although when Sánchez found himself in hot water, having shot the man who had raped his sister, he moved to Los Angeles. With the song’s opening lines, Camacho places himself within a dangerous world somewhere between fact and fiction: “I was born in hot water, then I came to Culiacán.” But the Culiacán of myth is not where you usually go to escape hot water-it’s where you go when other options are worse, or when hot water feels like home.Ĭuliacán is the capital of Sinaloa state, home to the Sinaloa Cartel, birthplace of legends. From beyond the grave comes the moral of the story: Karma comes and goes, but nobody can escape the reaper.Īs though to prove this point, when the song hit #1, the man who sang it, 22-year-old Ariel Camacho, had been dead for a week. Instead of paying, the father goes to “collect the debt” with his gun, but his Browning is no match for the kidnappers’ Remington R15s. They kidnap his daughters and demand a ransom. The song is credited only to a mysterious songwriter named El Diez and its eight short Spanish stanzas tell a tightly coiled story: After moving to a notorious cartel hub, our narrator starts earning money in the trafficking game. But before last March, no narcocorrido had ever hit #1 on the Hot Latin chart.
It was a corrido, part of Mexico’s century-old ballad tradition about everyday heroes facing impossible odds according to Salon’s Alexander Zaitchik, corridos are like “contemporary news reports-a Mexican version of Chuck D’s description of rap as black America’s CNN.” With the rise of Mexican drug cartels over the last few decades, corridos have largely given way to narcocorridos, story songs lauding the exploits of illicit kingpins and their employees. Five of them involved slick, established stars like Enrique Iglesias singing about love or dancing, but the sixth hit was different. So far in 2015, six different songs have topped Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart.
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