El Chapo de Sinaloa

Little did I imagine when I saw the advertisements that El Chapo de Sinaloa was coming to town for a show that I would attend it. I had never heard of him before. But yesterday I met with gentlemen who work for the Pastoral Society of the Catholic Church and who help mediate interactions between the organizations that co-administer the Sierra del Lacandon National Park and the people living and farming there. At the end of the meeting some of them invited me to come along with them and I said sure, why not. It turns out we were going to watch the performance from a restaurant that is right next to the stadium where the show took place, since as friends of the owner of the restaurant we were VIPs (their words, they said VIPs and they even pronounced the letters like we do in english, vee-eye-pea, as opposed to how it would be in spanish, vay-ee-pay) and so we got to have a private party on the terrace and enjoy the show. The crowd that had actually bought tickets and were in the stadium really wasn't that large, and according to my companions this was because the last time that a ranchera style concert had been in the stadium it had been extremely full and that some of the men in the audience had fired their guns in the air to show their appreciation for the performance. This frightened the audience, causing everyone to dive to the grown (except Zaira, Memo's sister-in-law, who didn't want to get her clothes dirty), and thus I guess many people decided to put the CD on and drink in their living room. Apparently this ranchera style music attracts the drug-trafficking population of Petén and they like to walk around with this guns in their belt and then show off once they've gotten a bit drunk. Fortunately there were no shots last night, we watched the show placidly from the terrace, and though I had no idea who El Chapo was before the show, I definitely recognized many of his hits from the radio around here. And it was good because I also met some men who work in the Public Ministry on environmental affairs and who are involved in the bureaucratic process of forcibly removing (apparently usually without success) communities illegally settled in the park. Networking!