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Peso Pluma, the Mexican singer-songwriter who burst onto the worldwide stage earlier this yr, stated security issues had pressured him to cancel his Oct. 14 present in Tijuana, Mexico, simply over every week after he was the obvious goal of threats from a drug cartel.
The singer, who carried out on the MTV Video Music Awards final week, had already postponed a string of live shows in the US for later this fall. Pluma’s U.S. performances are imagined to resume on Sept. 30 in Chula Vista, Calif.
“Our goal is to guard the followers and our staff,” learn a press release posted on Wednesday by the singer on Instagram. “For the protection of everybody concerned, we’ll cancel our present in Tijuana.”
Peso Pluma has written and appeared on a number of tracks devoted to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, or “El Chapo,” the previous chief of the Sinaloa Cartel who’s serving a life sentence in an American jail.
Final week, three banners containing threats written in large pink letters had been noticed in several areas of the border metropolis. They addressed the 24-year-old artist, with one warning him in Spanish to “Chorus from showing this October 14. As a result of it is going to be your final presentation.”
The banners, generally known as narcomantas, had been signed with the initials of Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or Jalisco New Era Cartel, one in every of Mexico’s strongest drug cartels and a rival of El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel.
Authorities told local media final week that they’d detained one individual in reference to the threats and had been investigating.
It was unclear whether or not the Jalisco New Era Cartel was accountable for the banners, however narcomantas have been a permanent type of public messaging for organized crime for greater than a decade. They typically comprise messages for authorities, rivals or the general public.
Peso Pluma, whose actual identify is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija and whose stage identify interprets to Featherweight, has helped lead an international surge in what is understood in the US beneath the umbrella time period regional Mexican music. He was featured on the hit tune “Ella Baila Sola” that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s World 200 chart.
The singer, who’s on a North American live performance tour following the discharge of his album “Génesis,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart upon its launch in June, and has tallied lots of of hundreds of thousands of digital streams. He’s finest recognized for corridos tumbados, a contemporary spin on narcorridos, songs that inform tales of the Mexican drug commerce, combining regional Mexican kinds like ranchera, norteño, banda and mariachi with influences from American and Latin rap.
Not like his predecessors, Peso Pluma has reached a stage of worldwide stardom that has introduced a brand new viewers to the hazards of a style which might be chillingly acquainted inside Mexico. Drug cartels have been suspected as ordering the killings of stars together with Valentin Elizalde and Chalino Sanchez, who had been murdered after performing exhibits.
Whereas the hazard Mexican musicians performing in Mexico face have subsided lately, Tijuana has stood out as one of many cities the place artists are nonetheless routinely threatened, in response to Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, a professor at San Diego State College who has studied the connection between Mexican music and arranged crime.
The cancellation of the Oct. 14 present marks the second time this yr Peso Pluma has canceled a efficiency within the metropolis.
In February, a live performance he was scheduled to carry out alongside different Mexican artists together with Eden Muñoz, Roberto Tapia and El Fantasma was canceled by the organizer, which cited “insecurity and threats in the direction of different occasions.”
Earlier that month, a meet-and-greet occasion by the band Grupo Arriesgado at a shopping mall was interrupted by the sound of gunfire that prompted the band to cancel its show within the metropolis. Threats in opposition to them had additionally been issued on a narcomanta, Mexican media reported.
