The Mazatlán Carnival — especially important this year as the city attempts to revive its tourism economy — has been rocked by two prominent regional Mexican music acts cancelling performances due to narco threats.
One of Mexico’s biggest celebrations of its kind, Carnival 2025 opened Thursday and runs through Tuesday in Mazatlán, the state of Sinaloa’s largest city behind the oft-narco-ravaged capital of Culiacán.
Grupo Firme, scheduled to perform on Saturday, canceled their show after a narcomanta (narco banner) threatening the band was found in Tijuana alongside a severed head. The message warned, “Grupo Firme, if you play at the Mazatlán Carnival, we will kill you all … even the one who puts on the lights … remember that you live in Tijuana.”
Hours later, singers Jorge Medina (who was born in Mazatlán) and Josi Cuen also canceled their performance, which was scheduled for Thursday night, citing “issues beyond our control.”
While they didn’t explicitly mention threats, the timing raised suspicions of a connection — and highlighted the growing influence of drug cartels on the music industry.
In January, Mexican corridos tumbados singer Natanael Cano received threats on a narco banner hung outside a high school in Hermosillo, Sonora. Allegedly placed by the Los Mata Salas criminal group, the banners accused Cano and two other music stars of supporting a rival gang.
Peso Pluma, another huge star of corridos tumbados and narcocorridos — music that often glorifies the exploits of cartels, outlaws and criminal kingpins and forgives violence against women — canceled several concerts in 2023 after receiving death threats, including one written on a narco banner in Tijuana that used the signature “CJNG” for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
To replace the seven-member Grupo Firme — a Latin Grammy winner in 2021 for best banda album — in Mazatlán on Saturday night, the famous Aguilar family has stepped up.
Their concert of regional Mexican music — mariachi, ranchera and norteño — will be headlined by nine-time Grammy and Latin Grammy award winner Pepe Aguilar along with his daughter Ángela and son Leonardo, themselves recording stars with several Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations between them.
(Perhaps this show will make up for their scheduled “Grito de Independencia” performance last September in Culiacán, which was canceled due to a violent cartel turf war in the city at that time.)
Scheduled to fill in for Medina and Cuen on Thursday night was an act of former Mexican stars billed as ’90s Pop Tour.
Medina and Cuen, who have teamed up on a tour titled Juntos (Together), are both former lead singers of the successful grupera band La Arrolladora Banda El Limón, which started in the Sinaloa town of El Limón de los Peraza.
Other scheduled performers at this year’s Mazatlán Carnival — iconic opera singer Plácido Domingo, 22-time Latin Grammy Award winner Alejandro Sanz and three-decade norteño favorites La Adictiva from Sinaloa — remained in the lineup.
As for the narco threats against the musicians, the Mazatlán threats are part of a growing trend of cartel intimidation targeting regional Mexican musicians.
“Personally, I think the government is losing control of this situation,” singer Julio Preciado said in the online newspaper Infobae. “I don’t know where we are going with this. The situation is very complicated.”
Some say the threats have effectively given cartels power to curate festival and concert lineups, with the states of Baja California, Sinaloa and Jalisco being hotspots for this phenomenon. Some cities, like Tijuana, have attempted to address the issue by banning narcocorridos in public shows.
While Peso Pluma, Natanael Cano and Fuerza Régida have long sung about the narco lifestyle, Grupo Firme was once praised by former Mexico president Andrés Manuel López Obrador for not doing so. He even played the band’s song “Ya Supérame” during a press conference.
With reports from Infobae and Rolling Stone
