I’m taking some time to write this text in english since my main goal is to send an idea about this new culture, style of living or however you want to call it called “Narcocultura” (prefix Narco=Narcotraffic and cultura=culture). So in the meantime if you see an strange English, please understand that these words are written by an native spanish speaker that has been living 26 years in Mexico.

I was born in 1983 in Culiacan, Sinaloa capital city of the state of Sinaloa, for those that doesn’t event have an idea where this is, is in the northwestern area of Mexico very close to the Gulf of California, actually Culiacan and Los Cabos are at the same height position they are divided by the Pacific Ocean or the “Mar de Cortes”. I can’t remember much information about my first 5 years (like almost everybody, I guess), I think the first word I learned relating Drug dealers was “Gomero”, I remember how everybody talked about Gomeros and things like “Be quiet, don’t say anything, he (or she) is Gomero, that’s why he has a lot of money, cars, etc”. When I was 7 years old I remember my first “Gun fighting”, I was in a car with my mom and we were crossing an residential area called “Chapultepec” in Culiacan and there was a fight between these “Gomeros” and some Federal agents in a big and fancy house.

My childhood was pretty normal like any boy living in Culiacan, you have your friends at school and some of them lived near your house or neighborhood (Since it wasn’t a big city in those days). When you are  child you always have some friend that is not very liked by your parents, mostly because they are trouble kids or they have disfunctional parents, but in Culiacan in those days you can have another reason to avoid your kids getting along with another kids, he’s father is a “Gomero”.

I remember when my father was building our last house (He was in the building buisness in those days), this new house was going to be in a new neighborhood and as always, people said that this neighborhood was the new place for the narco living, the place where the new “Gomeros” were going to live. Anyway three or four months before moving to that house, I remember sleeping in the old house and been awaked at 5 AM approx it was like a big firework burned out, I didn’t take it as a big deal so I returned to bed and fall asleep. Next day when I was in school the main topic in the classrooms was the “Bombazos”, apparentely two bombs installed in cars were detonated in different points in the city causing human lives and lots of damages in the houses around, I remember that all windows glasses around there were completely destroyed. Anyway, after some work to convince my mother to move to the new house we finally moved on, six months after moving there, I remember that I was taking my dog outside for a while and in that moment, I started hearing lots of “fireworks”, that was the first time I remember hearing an Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 (AK-47) known in Mexico as “Cuerno de chivo” just about 30 meters away from where I was standing, I never imagined in that time that those kind of guns were going to be the ones that were going to kill thousands of mexicans some years later.

Image via Wikipedia

Part 2 – Being a teenager, sharing time and space with the new generations of drug lords in Sinaloa and the role models or icons that are followed by a young man that wants to be a Narco