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`Tex Mex Beatles’ song inspired by Times story

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The Krayolas, who when they first emerged on the U.S. music scene in San Antonio were known as the ‘Tex Mex Beatles’, recently got in touch with our Mexico City office to let correspondent Ken Ellingwood know that one of his stories inspired a song on their latest album.

‘Corrido Twelve Heads in a Bag’ on the ‘Long Leaf Pine (No Smack Gum)’ album was written by Hector Saldana because, according to Saldana’s note, he was ‘so affected’ by Ellingwood’s Dec. 22 report, which chronicled the latest macabre discovery in the ongoing drug war in Mexico.

Saldana and his family are Mexican but have lived in the United States for generations. The band member explains more about what motivated him to write the song here in this NPR interview.

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Ellingwood’s gruesome report said:

‘Twelve men were decapitated and dumped at separate sites in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said Sunday.

‘Mexican news outlets quoted Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo as saying that eight of the men were identified as Mexican soldiers and another as a former state police commander. Earlier, Mexican media had said that the victims’ close-cropped hair indicated they were soldiers.’

Lyrics to the corrido by the Krayolas are in both English and Spanish and go as follows:

Mataron a los soldados, nunca volveran,

Dejaron los cuerpos descabezados

Nunca sabran quienes son

Twelves heads in a bag left on the side of the road

Found in a country God no longer knows

Twelve heads in a bag, I swear I read it yesterday

Buried like the others on page 27A

Twelve heads in a bag, lost count to my dismay

Fifty-three hundred must have somehow got in the way

Some of them down on the pass in old Guerrero state

Where one man’s back porch is another’s graveyard fate

Twelve heads in a bag, screaming out, ‘What did they do?’

Wrapped up like garbage, be thankful it ain’t you

Found a few in Chiapas, down n Juarez, too

Where the girls lost are faceless, and the killers wear no shoes

Twelve heads in a bag pending family notification

Short military haircuts, cartel retaliation

For every one you take, the note says, ‘Man, we’ll take ten’

On the road into this city, the machete always win

Twelve heads in a bag, eight soldiers barely boys

Tortured and shot up, boys will be boys

The Mexican authorities were offended or so they say

At the sight of a cartoon that ran on Christmas day

You can listen to ‘Corrido Twelve Heads in a Bag’ here:

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City


Audio track provided by Hector Saldana.

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