Mario Quintero

One of the most popular and controversial Mexican songwriters of his generation, Mario Quintero rose to fame in the mid-'90s as the leader of the wildly successful norteño band los Tucanes de Tijuana. Quintero's greatest strength was writing the narco-corrido, or drug ballad, a modern-day form that paid tribute to smugglers and drug lords in much the same way that traditional corridos chronicled the generals, bandits, and other rugged frontier heroes who dared to rebel against accepted authority. Narco-corridos had been around for several decades, but Quintero's contained some...