She defended “El Chapo”. Now this lawyer is using her drug fame to launch a music career

MEXICO CITY — Driving in a black SUV with tinted windows, lawyer Mariel Colón pulls up to the gate of a remote mansion, passing a security guard alongside Emma Coronel, wife of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Wearing sports suits and sunglasses, the couple enters a dimly lit room full of elegantly dressed men smoking cigars.

All to the sound of trumpets.

The scene comes from the latest music video “La Señora” by Colón, who worked as Guzmán’s defense attorney for several years when he stood trial in the US. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music is becoming a global phenomenon, the 31-year-old is using her connections with the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel to launch a music career under the 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 struggled to find a job. This allowed them to model together last weekend during Milan Fashion Week, causing delight in Italy and beyond.

“(My job) opens doors for me because of the disease and because of people’s curiosity… They want to understand it,” Colón told The Associated Press. “I always told people Mariel was a singer turned lawyer.”

The Puerto Rican daughter of a music executive, she grew up listening to Mexican ballads and loved the passion of heartbreak that is embedded in the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family encouraged her to pursue a law degree.

She began working on Guzmán’s defense team in 2018, after graduating from law school in the U.S. and coming across an ad on Craigslist seeking a part-time paralegal to help prepare a Spanish-speaking client for trial.

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

Once one of the world’s most wanted men, Guzmán led the Sinaloa Cartel in a bloody war for control of the international drug trade, and gained cinematic notoriety for his dramatic prison escapes before extradition to the US in 2017. Now his sons, known as “Los Chapitos ”, are locked in a deadly power struggle with another faction of the cartel, leaving mutilated bodies in the state capitol.

“(People ask) how can I do this job, that I’m part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night?” Colon said. “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 at the maximum security prison in Colorado where he is serving a life sentence. She declined to discuss details of Guzmán’s cases, citing attorney-client privilege.

Trying to make contact, Colón sings to Guzmán and other clients, who included other Mexican drug traffickers and, briefly, Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Colón Guzmán serenades with Mexican classics from bands such as Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana. She added that to this day he is one of the first to hear her new music.

“No matter the genre, whatever I liked, I sang it to him because he didn’t have a radio,” she said.

Her music career began a little over a year ago when she shot her first music video, “La Abogada,” in which Colón, dressed in a pink suit, croons to law enforcement from a courtroom. Like most of the genre, its music varies from percussion-heavy banda to character-focused ballads known as corridos.

“La Señora” depicts a table covered with diamonds, Guzmán’s wife riding a trotting horse and strolling by the pool.

Colón said the song was based on Coronel’s life and is a message of redemption and second chances. It was also a way to offer the 35-year-old a job if she completed an internship.

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

“Small waist and beautiful eyes. A brain for business and a strong voice for bad boys. Only El Chaparrito shows his tender side,” exclaims Colón in his ballad. “El Chaparrito,” meaning “the little guy,” plays on Guzmán’s nickname.

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

While the corrido has dominated for over a century, young artists are filling stadiums, turning the style on its head, mixing classic ballads with trap into corridos tumbados.

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

Drug culture has long been part of corridos, with many singers romanticizing human traffickers as “an aspirational figure opposed to the system,” said Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“These are cultural expressions that relate to the realities of the country,” Saldívar said. But “they kind of glorify these criminals or do it in a way that some people think promotes this lifestyle.”

A classic example: the king of the corridors, Chalino Sánchez, used the violence around him in Sinaloa to write lyrics while condemning the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocent people. He was shot and killed while performing at the state capitol in 1992.

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

Tijuana later banned drug ballads altogether to protect the “eyes and ears” of young people trying to stop the violence. Local authorities in northern states previously banned musicians singing narcocorridos.

Colón, who has not gone so far as to glorify guns and drugs, is quick to defend narcocorridos.

“There’s a reason why Netflix made Narcos. It is the audience. It intrigues people,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they applaud or celebrate what that person has done, but they actually have some admiration for them or their life. Not everything is violence. These people have hearts, they have families.

While Colón plans to release her first album in December, Coronel 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 for a side event during Milan Fashion Week, said her choice was a “shock”.

“People evolve. My program is not about judging, but about showing the different dimensions of women, their strength and resilience,” she wrote in a statement. The next day, photos of Coronel wearing 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 adhere to their code of ethics.

Meanwhile, interest in Colón and Coronel’s film continues to grow – it has approximately 750,000 views on YouTube.