Tag Archives: Movimiento Alterado

Ariel Camacho, narcocorrido/Movimiento Alterado singer, dies

News out of Mexico is that another narcocorrido singer has died.

Ariel Camacho, lead singer of Los Plebes del Rancho, was killed Wednesday in a car accident in Sinaloa. He was 22.

Camacho was part of the Movimiento Alterado, which first grew out of Burbank, of all places, and drafted young singers, doing gigs at wedding parties and quinceneras in L.A. backyards, and transformed them into menacing narcosingers. d30d6e43f0b0850dc39097f43547e72b

The movement has now spread to Mexico and to other record labels. Camacho’s label was DEL Records.

The Altered Movement is known for especially graphic lyrics depicting drug violence, and for the praising the powerful, particularly well-known Sinaloa Cartel figures, in very noncorrido form. The corrido has typically exalted the lone, heroic figure – a man going up against power and probably doomed, but worthy of a song nevertheless.

MA, however, has made a fetish of praising powerful cartel leaders, among them Manuel Torres Felix, El Ondeado (the Unhinged), the late head of security for the Sinaloa Cartel.

All in all, narcocorrido singer has to be one of the region’s most dangerous profession. Beginning with Chalino Sanchez, whose life I wrote about in my first book and who was murdered in Sinaloa in 1992, numerous singers who followed in his footsteps have been killed. Sanchez’s son, Adan, also died in a car crash.

Saul Viera, El Gavilancillo, was shot to death outside a Denny’s in Bellflower in 1998. Among others to die are Valentin Elizalde, shot to death in Reynosa in 2006, and El Halcon de la Sierra, Fabian Ortega, in 2010.

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Filed under Culture, Drugs, Mexico, Uncategorized

`Macho Prieto’ Dies — the most sung-about hitman in many a year

Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, the alleged chief of hitmen for Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, himself the alleged co-leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, has been killed in Puerto Penasco, Sonora.

Inzunza, 42, was from Culiacan, Sinaloa and better known by his nickname, El Macho Prieto.
He ran operations for the cartel in Mexicali for the cartel, which had wrested the town and plaza away from the wounded Arellano Felix Cartel that controlled it for two decades before the early 200s.
The US government had deemed him one of its most-wanted drug traffickers and the Mexican government had offered a reward of 3 million pesos for him.

 

Apart from allegedly running a ruthless hit squad responsible for some 80 murders, including a dozen policemen, El Macho Prieto had what I thought was the distinction of being the hitman with most songs written about him, perhaps in the history of organized crime — mostly from singers in the Movimiento Alterado. The MA is a movement of singers, based here in Los Angeles, whose lyrics are as bloodthirsty as the people and killings they describe from the drug war down in Mexico.

The MA guys just loved singing about El Macho Prieto, as you will see if you do a Google search, as I just did, for “macho prieto corridos.”

As you can see, it took about five minutes for someone to write a corrido about his death and put it on youtube.com.

 

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Filed under Drugs, Gangs, Mexico