Mexico City – In a Mexican military base, Captain Eduardo Barrón does not collect a rifle but a microphone. When starting starting start, run a song while the sounds of the trumpets and the accordions roar of a band of a dozen soldiers of camouflage dresses.
The rhythmic style, known as run, is recognizable to almost all the souls in the Latin American nation of 130 million. But Barrón’s lyrics diverge abruptly from those who smile in speakers throughout Mexico.
“I still remember the day I joined the army,” he sprouted. “This is a dream that my soul longed for, and if I lived another life, it would become a soldier again.”
Barrón, who acts under the name of “Eddy Barrón”, began launching videos and musical songs on Spotify last year in coordination with the Mexican army. Their lyrics extol the virtues of the army, celebrate the proud parents and honor the fallen.
They remain in marked contrast with the Narco controversial rulesA subgenre that has caused controversy as famous artists pay tribute to posters chiefs, portraying them as rebels that go against the system.
Faced with the challenge of addressing a musical style that represents the violence of the poster, local governments throughout Mexico have increasingly prohibited actions and conducted criminal investigations of bands and musicians. The president of Mexico even promised to reduce the popularity of Narco Corridos while promoting other less violent musical styles.
But Barrón, 33, is adopting a different approach. Instead of censorship, he wants to take advantage of the impulse with his own military runs, an effort to infuse gender with more socially acceptable letters and recruit young people to the military.
“Narco Life is style and make it really beautiful … but the reality is different,” he said. “We are playing our role to invite young people to join this positive music movement.”
Barron’s military ballads are part of a broader thrust of the government headed by Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, who has proposed that the government promotes runs on “love, fall of love and peace.”
He even announced a Mexican music competition sponsored by the Government in the northern state of Durango showing music That avoids “glorifying violence, drugs and discrimination against women.”
“Mexican music will completely change,” he said.
But in a subculture defined by resistance and put words to the harsh realities that face the poor, government initiatives around gender have met skepticism about official attempts to promote family narrations.
“I don’t think using runs as a way to incorporate other types of narratives is a bad idea,” said José Manuel Valenzuela, a Tijuana sociologist who studies the genre. “There are many songs that sing from peace and love. It’s just that those are not those that are turning out to be successes … because we are living in a moment of injured young people.”
The corridos were born in the nineteenth century, their classic band instruments and the accordion rooted in German and Polish migration to Mexico. In a moment of generalized illiteracy, they were widely used to transmit oral stories.
The ballads took off during the Mexican revolution, when they were used to share stories of war heroes and glory of the conflict.
That is why Barrón says he did not invent military corridos, but that he is simply bringing them back.
“The runs come from the revolution, and we are doing the same as those soldiers and revolutionaries, although in a different age, but the result is the same,” he said.
The genre evolved for generations, from singing about the smuggling of Tequila during the era of the prohibition of the 1920s in the Tequileros de Corridos until dealing with the growing wave of poster violence in Mexico with Narco runs.
“All the big social problems are counted through corridos,” Valenzuela said. “It is a metaphor to talk about what we have been living.”
Barrón said he would play the guitar with his father’s Mexican regional music band when he was a teenager, and write his own music. He would bring his guitar to play in deployments after joining the army at 20.
In 2021, he said he began writing his own songs about his time in the army and singing with a FX military band, which bears the name of the type of weapon that the army uses. But music was never made public.
Around 2023, the genre exploded when artists such as weight weight, governed force and Natanael Cano began to mix the classic style with trap music in what is known as runs lying down. That same year, Pen weight He surpassed Taylor Swift as the most transmitted artist on YouTube.
A year later, the Mexican Army decided to publish Barrón’s music under his artistic name.
The musical videos, which have registered tens of thousands of views only on YouTube, are in layers with images of heavy -duty weapons, the Mexican flag, the spike wire and the barrón in camouflage and infrared glasses thrown over their military helmet.
Originally intended to entertain the troops and boost military recruitment among Mexican youth, Barrón’s songs acquired a different meaning amid the renewed controversy that has come with the rise of the runs.
The musical style has been criticized for a long time for romantizing the violence of the poster, but has reached a turning point in recent years.
Mexican states have implemented performance prohibitions, and prominent artists have received death threats, often claiming to be rival posters whose leaders are glorified in their music. And musicians have been forced to cancel shows due to concerns about possible violence.
The controversy intensified last week, after the face of top poster boss nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera was projected on a large screen Behind the Band Los Alegres del Barranco at a music festival in the northern state of Jalisco. The incident, which occurs shortly after the Oseguera poster was linked to a ranch under investigation such as a training field and a body elimination site in Jalisco, sent shock waves throughout Mexico.
The performance was found with a waterfall of criticism. Two Mexican states announced criminal investigations, concerts were canceled and the Trump administration revoked the visas of the members of the US band. UU.
He also marked a tone of hardening of Sheinbaum, who requested an investigation into the concert, added: “Violence or criminal groups cannot be justified.”
Barrón, who opposes a prohibition of runs, believes that the solution is to continue singing undercover in camouflage in the hope of recovering Mexican music from his childhood of negative stereotypes that have grown up to define it.
He said the army already plans to launch new songs in the coming months.
“Unfortunately, we have been trapped with this label of runs as negative music,” he said. “A better focus is to recover the genre and take a different path to change the conversation.”
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