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MEXICO CITY (AP) – Riding in a black SUV with tinted windows, lawyer Mariel Colón rolls up to the gates of a remote mansion, walking past a security guard alongside Emma Coronel, the wife of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Sporting suits and sunglasses, the pair step into a dimly lit room full of slickly dressed men smoking cigars.

All to roar trumpets.

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

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

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

The Puerto Rican daughter of a music director grew up listening to Mexican ballads, loving the heartbreaking passion infused in the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family pushed her to pursue a law degree.

He began working for Guzmán’s defense team in 2018 after graduating from law school in the United States and stumbling upon a Craigslist ad seeking a part-time paralegal to help prepare a Spanish-speaking client for trial.

Only later did he learn that he would be working with Guzmán, taking him and the Colonel as full-time clients. She saw it as a “great opportunity professionally” and said she was not easily intimidated.

Once among 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 prison escapes before he was extradited to the United States 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 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 Colón. “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. He declined to discuss the details of Guzmán’s cases, citing attorney-client privilege.

Trying to build a relationship, Colón sings for Guzmán and other clients, who have included other Mexican drug traffickers and, briefly, Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Colón stars Guzmán with Mexican classics from bands including Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana. To this day, she says, he is among the first to hear her new music.

“Whatever genre, anything that came out that I liked, I would sing it to him because he doesn’t have a radio,” she said.

Her musical career began a little more than a year ago, when she released her first video, “La Abogada,” which features Colón dressed in a pink suit, crooning to law enforcement from a courtroom. Like much of the genre, its music is diverse, ranging from percussion-heavy banda to character-focused ballads known as corridos.

“La Señora” features a table sprinkled with diamonds, Guzmán’s wife walking on the back of a trotting horse and walking by a pool.

Colón said the song is based on Coronel’s life, sending a message of redemption and a second chance. It was also a means of offering the 35-year-old work, one of the conditions of her probation.

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

“Small waist and beautiful eyes. Brains for business and a strong voice for the bad boys. She only shows her affectionate side to El Chaparrito,” Colón belts in his ballad. “El Chaparrito,” which means “the little shorty,” plays on Guzmán’s nickname.

Colón’s musical rise coincides with the relative golden age of Mexican music, which grew 400% worldwide over the past five years on Spotify. In 2023, Mexican artist Peso Pluma passed Taylor Swift as the most streamed artist on YouTube.

While corridos have dominated for over a century, young artists have filled stadiums by turning the style on its head, mixing classic ballads with trap in tumbados corridos.

But it also cuts to the heart of a larger debate: Does the music capture the reality facing many Mexicans or does it glorify the narco-violence that has long plagued the Latin American nation?

Narco culture has long been a part of corridos, with many singers idealizing traffickers as “an ambitious figure going against the system,” said Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“They are cultural expressions that speak to the reality of the country,” said Saldívar. But “in a way they glorify these criminals, or do it in a way where some feel it pushes this kind of lifestyle.”

A classic example: corrido kingpin Chalino Sánchez used the violence around him in Sinaloa to spin words while also calling out the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocents. He was shot dead at a performance in the state capital in 1992.

Last year, Peso Pluma – who paid tribute to Guzmán in songs – had to cancel a show in Tijuana after the 25-year-old received threats from a rival of the Sinaloa Cartel, that if he came, “he would” n last performance. “

Later, Tijuana banned the performance of narco ballads altogether to protect the “eyes and ears” of young people as it tried to curb violence. Previously, local authorities in the northern states banned musicians singing narcocorridos.

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

“There’s a reason why Netflix made the show ‘Narcos’, it’s because there’s an audience for it. It upsets people,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they approve or celebrate what this person did, but they 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 put out her first record in December, Coronel has leveraged “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 she was “shocked” by the choice.

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

On Wednesday, Italy’s National Chamber of Fashion issued an “urgent” press release saying the show was unrelated to official fashion week events and that brands needed to follow its code of ethics.

Meanwhile, views on Colón and Coronel’s video continue to grow, clocking around 750,000 views on YouTube.