She defended ‘El Chapo.’ Now this lawyer is using her narco fame to launch a music career

Associated press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Lawyer Mariel Colón drives up to the gate of a remote mansion in a black SUV with tinted windows and strolls past a security guard side by side with Emma Coronel, the wife of notorious drug lord Joaquín. El Chapo” Guzman.

Wearing sports suits and sunglasses, the pair enter a dimly lit room full of sharply dressed men smoking cigars.

All to the roar of trumpets.

The scene is from “La Señora,” the latest music video from Colón, who worked as a lawyer for Guzmán for several years while he was on trial in a U.S. court. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music is becoming a global phenomenon, the 31-year-old is leveraging her partnership with the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel to launch her music career under the stage name “Mariel La Abogada” (Mariel , the lawyer).

“La Señora” features – and pays tribute to – Guzmán’s wife, who was released from prison last year and is struggling to find work. It paved the way for the two to model together at Milan Fashion Week last weekend, raising eyebrows in Italy and beyond.

“(My work) opens doors for me because of the morbidity, because of people’s curiosity… They want to understand this,” Colón told The Associated Press. “I’ve always told people that Mariel is a singer turned lawyer.”

The Puerto Rican daughter of a music director grew up listening to Mexican ballads and loving the broken passion infused in the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family forced her to study law.

She started working for Guzmán’s defense team in 2018 after completing law school in the US and came across an ad on Craigslist looking for a part-time paralegal to prepare a Spanish-speaking client for trial.

Only later did she learn that she would be working with Guzmán and taking him and Coronel on full-time as clients. She saw it as a “professional opportunity” and said she was not easily intimidated.

Once one of the most wanted men in the world, Guzmán led his Sinaloa cartel in a bloody war for control of the international drug trade, gaining cinematic fame for his dramatic jailbreaks before his extradition to the US in 2017. Now his his sons, known as ‘Los Chapitos’, are locked in a deadly power struggle with another faction of the cartel, leaving mutilated bodies around the state capital.

“(People ask) how can I do this job, that I’m part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night?” said Colon. “I don’t care what they say about me. I sleep very well at night.”

Colón is one of the few people who maintains regular contact with Guzmán. She visits him three times a month in the maximum security prison in Colorado, where he is serving a life sentence. She declined to discuss the details of Guzmán’s cases, citing attorney-client privilege.

In an effort to bond, Colón sings for Guzmán and other clients, including other Mexican drug traffickers and, for a short time, Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Colón serenades Guzmán with Mexican classics from Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana, among others. To this day, she said, he is one of the first to hear her new music.

“Whatever genre, whatever came out and whatever I liked, I sang it for him because he doesn’t have a radio,” she said.

Her musical career began just over a year ago, when she released her first video, “La Abogada,” which featured Colón dressed in a pink suit as he watched police from a courtroom. Like much of the genre, her music is diverse, ranging from percussion-heavy banda to character-oriented ballads known as corridos.

In “La Señora,” a table is strewn with diamonds as Guzmán’s wife strolls along a pond astride a trotting horse.

Colón said the song was based on Coronel’s life and sent a message of redemption and second chances. It was also a way to offer the 35-year-old work, a condition of her probation.

Coronel, a former beauty queen, was released from prison last year after serving her three-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering linked to her husband’s drug empire. Coronel declined to be interviewed.

“A small waist and beautiful eyes. A brain for business and a strong voice for the bad guys. She only shows her loving side to El Chaparrito,” says Colón in her ballad. ‘El Chaparrito’, which means ‘the little little one’, plays on Guzmán’s nickname.

Colón’s musical rise coincides with a relative golden age of Mexican music, which has grown 400% globally on Spotify in the past five years. In 2023, Mexican artist Peso Pluma beat Taylor Swift as the most streamed artist on YouTube.

While corridos have dominated for more than a century, young artists have filled stadiums by turning the style on its head and mixing classical ballads with stairs in corridos tumbados.

But it also goes to the heart of a broader debate: Does the music reflect the reality that many Mexicans face or does it glorify the narco-violence that has long plagued the Latin American nation?

Narcoculture has long been part of corridos, with many singers idealizing traffickers as “an ambitious figure who goes against the system,” says Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“They are cultural expressions that speak to the reality of the country,” Saldívar said. But “in a sense they are glorifying these criminals, or doing so in a way that some people feel encourages this type of lifestyle.”

A classic example: King of corridos Chalino Sánchez used the violence around him in Sinaloa to spin lyrics, while also calling out the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and murdering innocents. He was shot dead during a performance in the state capital in 1992.

Last year, Peso Pluma – who paid tribute to Guzmán in song – was forced to cancel a show in Tijuana after the 25-year-old received threats from a Sinaloa cartel rival that if he came, it would be “your last performance . ”

Later, Tijuana banned the performance of narco ballads altogether to protect “the eyes and ears” of young people as they try to curb violence. Local authorities in northern states previously banned musicians who sang narcocorridos.

Colón, who hasn’t gone so far as to glorify guns or drugs, is quick to defend narcocorridos.

“There’s a reason why Netflix created ‘Narcos’, because there’s an audience for it. It intrigues people,” she says. “That doesn’t mean they applaud or celebrate what this person has done, but they do have some kind of admiration for this person or this person’s life. Not everything is violence. These people have hearts, they have families.”

While Colón plans to release her first record in December, Coronel has used ‘La Señora’ to launch her career as a model and social media influencer.

April Black Diamond, the designer who asked Coronel and Colón to model at a side event during Milan Fashion Week, said her choice was met with “shock.”

“People evolve. My platform is not about judging, but about showcasing different dimensions of women, their strength and resilience,” she wrote in a statement. The next day, photos of Coronel in one of the designer’s dresses appeared on a billboard in New York’s Times Square.

On Wednesday, Italy’s National Chamber of Fashion issued an “urgent” press release saying the show was not linked to official Fashion Week events and that brands must follow the code of ethics.

Meanwhile, eyes on Colón and Coronel’s video continue to grow, with approximately 750,000 views on YouTube.