Mexican jazz-rock combo Troker return to the UK
Troker performing at Guadalajara’s Barramericano last week.
A decade into their career, this six-piece band from Guadalajara have just enjoyed their most successful year to date, despite still refusing to sign a formal contract with any record label. After playing three gigs at Glastonbury last year they embarked on their first ever European tour and then went on to perform at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March.
While many Latino bands are confined to success in Spanish-speaking countries, Troker’s heady mix of free jazz, rock, funk, hip-hop and mariachi music is entirely instrumental, meaning there is no language barrier for foreign audiences to overcome.
With immediately infectious tunes and an energetic live show, Troker proved the perfect act for Glastonbury’s fourth biggest venue, the West Holts Stage, which typically hosts a diverse mix of hip-hop, jazz, reggae, dub, soul and world music artists. Such was the impact of their midday debut performance in 2013 that the West Holts promoters quickly broke protocol by inviting them to return for a second consecutive year.
This time around the band will benefit from being given an hour-long, mid-afternoon set that will be broadcast by the BBC. They also have ten new tracks to draw on from their third full-length album, Crimen Sonoro, which the band describes as “our best work to date”.
Before disembarking on their imminent “Tequila Groove” European tour – which will also see the band play in London, Bristol, France, Austria, Switzerland and Slovenia – Troker debuted some of their new material before a dozen or so journalists at Barramericano, a small live venue in Guadalajara.
“We really focused on creating songs that would sound good live and complement our older material. They’re songs with a lot of energy,” said bassist Samo Gonzalez. “There are a lot of Mexican touches, you’ll hear mariachi trumpets, but that’s just something that came out naturally in the music because of our roots.”
Spanish for “Sound Crime,” Crimen Sonoro embraces a harder, darker sound that its 2010 predecessor El Rey del Camino. This, the band and those around them feel, is the record that they have been working towards for 10 years.
“Troker have achieved what they’ve always wanted: to sound like Troker. Now jazz, rock, funk, psychedelia and even kitsch are all living and partying together in a full, exotic mansion thanks to the magic of these six musicians,” says producer Gerry Rosado of the new record. On top of all those influences, the band said they even drew additional inspiration from dubstep after being exposed to the genre on their first visit to the UK.
Troker made their Glastonbury Festival debut on the West Holts Stage in 2013.
There has always been a strong visual element to Troker’s work and this album is effectively a soundtrack for a forthcoming graphic novel of the same name, with each song representing a different chapter. The key themes? “Love, heartbreak, murder and revenge,” Gonzalez said. “We’re really happy with the artwork, the production and the sound of the record,” he added.
Anyone who saw the band during last year’s brief UK tour may recognise the lead single Principe Charro, which combines a hip-hop groove with screaming horns and wild mariachi flourishes. Other highlights include Femme Fatal – think a funked up version of a classic film noire score – and the sublime Arsenic Lips, which flirts openly with ’90s G-funk and retro ’80s synths that sound straight out of the Scarface soundtrack.
Claroscuro is another treat, with its military drums and DJ Shadow-esque textures, while second single Tequila Death succeeds in distilling virtually all of Troker’s divergent influences into one spicy Mexican cocktail. After riding in on a muscular Queens of the Stone Age-like bassline, the track waltzes through fierce guitar licks, a stunning sax-versus-trumpet faceoff and some accomplished scratching by DJ Zero. At this point live performances see four sixths of the band take up the percussion, while the DJ and bass player lay down a heavy hip-hop instrumental.
Crimen Sonoro is available now on iTunes, but to experience these tunes at their fullest it is well worth catching Troker at their best this summer: live on stage.
Troker’s Tequila Groove Tour
20th June – Paper Dress Vintage, Shoreditch, London
22nd June – The Windmill, London
26th June – The Canteen, Bristol
27th June – West Holts Stage, Glastonbury Festival
1st July – Jazz Fest Wien, Vienna, Austria
2nd July – Lent Festival, Maribor, Slovenia
4th July – Estival Jazz, Lugano, Switzerland
6th July – Arges Summer Concert Series, Arges, France
For more information follow @TrokerOfficial or like Troker on Facebook.
The US State Department offered a reward of $5 million for information leading to the capture of ‘El Azul’ Esparragoza.
Mexican authorities are investigating reports that veteran drug trafficker Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno, alias “El Azul,” has died of a heart attack at the age of 65.
Citing anonymous police sources, Sinaloa newspaper Riodoce reported on Sunday evening that Esparragoza had died the previous afternoon. He is said to have damaged his spinal column in a car crash two weeks earlier and apparently suffered the heart attack upon trying to get out of bed.
Riodoce reported that his body has already been cremated and that the ashes will be taken to Culiacan, Sinaloa in the next few days. The Mexican government has not yet confirmed or denied Esparragoza’s death but the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) is reportedly investigating the rumors.
Born in Badiraguato, Sinaloa on February 3, 1949, Esparragoza became a member of Mexico’s federal police force in the 1970s before joining the Guadalajara Cartel, then the nation’s dominant drug trafficking organization. In 1986 he was arrested in connection with the abduction, torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment.
Upon release he assumed a leading role in the Juarez Cartel and later forged an alliance between that organization and the Sinaloa Cartel, through what would become known as the Federation. In recent years, Esparragoza is said to have led the Sinaloa Cartel alongside Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
The U.S. State Department offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture and/or prosecution of Esparragoza, while the Mexican government offered another 30 million pesos. In 2005 he was briefly ranked as the FBI’s second most wanted criminal after Osama Bin Laden.
If confirmed, Esparragoza’s death would be a major blow to the Sinaloa Federation, coming less than four months after Guzman’s arrest. Esparragoza always kept a much lower profile than the infamous “El Chapo,” but he was considered a highly experienced drug trafficker and an accomplished negotiator.
Earlier this year I discussed Esparagozza’s role in the Sinaloa Cartel with drug war analyst Sylvia Longmire. “He’s been very under the radar, everybody’s been talking about ‘El Chapo’ and obviously ‘El Mayo’ stepping in now that ‘El Chapo’ has gone. But ‘El Azul’ is a really good negotiator and he’s keeping that pipeline going. He’s been a major key in negotiating with rival cartels,” Longmire said. “He’s definitely much more diplomatic and charismatic and he’s very good at his job. He’s a businessman and he knows how to keep things stable, so I think his role has become much more prominent as time progresses.”
Esparragoza’s apparent death could enhance the prospect of internal divisions and a violent power struggle within the Federation, although no such fallout occurred after Guzman’s arrest when some analysts predicted that it would. One figure with sufficient gravitas to step in and take Esparragoza’s place is Damaso Lopez, alias “El Licenciado,” the man credited with overseeing Guzman’s escape from the maximum-security Puente Grande in 2001. His son, Damaso Lopez Junior, is Guzman’s godson is also regarded as a possible future leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
While some of Riodoce’s sources indicated that Esparragoza had died in Mexico City, others suggested that he died in Guadalajara.It would come as no surprise if he had been residing in the latter city, as shortly after his arrest Guzman reportedly told his captors that Esparragoza was most likely in Guadalajara.
In recent years the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has aggressively targeted Esparragoza’s money laundering operations, many of which are based in and around Guadalajara.
In July 2012 OFAC blacklisted nine entities and 10 individuals linked to Esparragoza under the Kingpin Act. These included several businesses run by members of his family in the municipality of Tlajomulco on the southern outskirts of the Guadalajara metropolitan area. Most recently, on February 27, OFAC designated Colombian-Mexican citizen Hugo Cuellar Hurtado, the owner of two Guadalajara pawn shops and a 57-acre ostrich ranch in Tlajomulco, for laundering drug money on Esparragoza’s behalf.
Given that Esparragoza’s death has not been confirmed – and the reports that his body has already been cremated indicate that it may be difficult for the government to verify – it remains possible that he could have faked his own death in a bid to avoid further scrutiny.
This is not uncommon in the world of Mexico’s drug gangs. Nazario Moreno Gonzalez of the Knights Templar benefited from the Mexican government’s claims that it killed him in December 2010, as this allowed him to operate without being hunted by the authorities until he was finally killed in March 2014.
In her 2010 book “Los Señores del Narco,” investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez also suggested that Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Esparragoza’s former boss in the Juarez Cartel, and Ignacio Coronel, with whom he worked in the Sinaloa Cartel, both faked their own deaths in order to escape the spotlight and retire in peace.
With Esparragoza having reached retirement age, it remains possible that he could have done the same. Unless the government can prove otherwise, conspiracy theories that he is still alive and well are bound to circulate.
Former Irapuato FC owner Tirso Martinez was arrested at his home in Leon in February.
Tirso Martinez Sanchez’s neighbors were taken by surprise when he was arrested by federal police officers at his home in Leon, Guanajuato on Sunday, February 2, 2014.
“We knew the feds were searching and asking for someone around here, but we never imagined it was our neighbor,” a local businessman told Queretaro’s Quadratin newspaper.
Aged 47 and measuring just 5”7, Martinez cut an inauspicious figure. Having ditched the expensive jewelry he used to show off in the director’s box at the Club Irapuato soccer stadium, he now went by the name Luis Angel Aguilar, drove a gray Hyundai Atos and lived in a modest apartment in Leon’s Martinica neighborhood.
A keen gambler, Martinez had reportedly placed millions of pesos worth of bets on cockfights in the local fair just days before his arrest. But he had kept a largely low profile in recent years and the neighbors were shocked to learn that we was one of Mexico’s most wanted drug barons and the subject of a $5 million reward in the United States.
Mexican authorities say Martinez, also known as Jose Martinez, “El Tio” and “El Futbolista,” ran his own drug-trafficking organization and used used to rub shoulders with many of the country’s most notorious kingpins, including Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Arturo Beltran Leyva.
The U.S. State Department estimates that from 2000 to 2003, Martinez “imported, transported, and distributed approximately 76 metric tons of cocaine into the United States.”
As head of the Martinez Sanchez Organization, he used a network of fake businesses to transport large shipments of Colombian cocaine through Mexico and into the United States and Europe, the State Department said. The shipments were transported by road, rail and sea to a network of large warehouses in California and Texas, from which they were redistributed to other cities across the United States.
Martinez also acted as an independent importer, transporter, and distributor on behalf of the Juarez Cartel, members of the Sinaloa Federation, and Colombian traffickers Victor and Miguel Mejia Munera. He is thought to have lived in Leon for the last seven years, while also directing operations from safe houses in Tijuana and his native Guadalajara, and in 2004 he was indicted for cocaine trafficking by a federal court in New York.
Aside from trafficking drugs, Martinez was also “responsible for organizing the laundering and remittance of millions of dollars in drug proceeds back to Mexico,” the State Department said. His money laundering operations allegedly involved three professional soccer clubs: Queretaro, Atletico Celaya and Irapuato FC. Martinez and jewelry merchant Kleber Mayer were joint-owners of the latter club and Martinez is also believed to have been a prominent investor in both Queretaro and Celaya, though he often sought to hide his tracks by operating behind false names.
Martinez’s elaborate soccer network began to unravel in October 2002 when Colombian drug trafficker Jorge Mario Rios Laverde, alias “El Negro,” was arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States. Rios, who also worked as a soccer agent and promoter in Mexico, was prosecuted for cocaine trafficking by Florida’s Southern District Court and sentenced to six years and three months in Georgia’s McRae prison.
According to Mexican newspaper Excelsior, Rios became a protected witness and informed the U.S. authorities that Martinez was involved in money laundering at Queretaro and Irapuato.
As investigators on both sides of the border unearthed further evidence of money laundering in Mexican soccer, the Mexican Football Federation (FMF) took action to cleanse the national game. In July 2004, the FMF dissolved first division sides Queretaro and Irapuato under the pretext of cutting fixture congestion by slimming the league down from 20 teams to 18. Celaya was also dissolved from the second division.
The owners of Queretaro and Irapuato received 10 million dollars in compensation after the two clubs were dissolved – ostensibly because they were adjudged to have the worst finances in the division. However, the real reason for their closure was made apparent when the FMF explicitly banned former Queretaro owners Alejandro and Jorge Vazquez Mellado from reviving either franchise because they were under investigation by the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) for money laundering and links to Rios’ Colombian brother-in-law Giovanni Avila.
Rios claimed that it was Avila, who also went by the name of Paul Solorzano, that had invited him to work in the soccer industry and had put him in contact with Mexican soccer promoter Guillermo Lara in 2001. Rios admitted to having worked for Lara at his agency, Promotora Internacional Fut Soccer, where he helped to arrange the transfer of Colombian midfielder Carlos Gutierrez from Bogota’s Millonarios FC to Mexican side Necaxa in 2002.
In July 2003, the Mexican authorities arrested Carlos Alvarez, another Colombian who played for Necaxa, as he tried to leave the country with almost $1.3 million in cash. Sweating heavily, he told the police he was taking the money to Colombia on behalf of a man, presumably Rios, whom he knew only as “El Negro.” Lara, who had negotiated Alvarez’s transfer to Necaxa, denied any involvement or knowledge of the money.
Guillermo Lara has been blacklisted in Colombia for links to drug trafficking and money laundering.
A prominent agent and promoter, Lara has been dogged by allegations of wrongdoing throughout his career. In 1993 he was declared “persona non grata” by the FMF, which accused him of embezzling almost $30,000 while working as a promoter for the Mexican national team. Lara reportedly fled the country when the PGR issued a warrant for his arrest, but he has since returned and began to resume work with the FMF after Justino Compean became president of the Federation in 2006. The pair had previously struck up a good relationship when Compean was Necaxa club president.
Now said to maintain an informal role as Compean’s chief guru, Lara has become an increasingly influential figure in Mexican soccer circles. He represents dozens of players and in 2012 he handled the sale of Colombian forward Jackson Martinez from Jaguares de Chiapas to Portuguese club Porto, where he has become one of the most sought-after strikers in Europe.
In recent years Lara has also organized Mexican national team fixtures against England, Holland and Italy. “It is clear that there are no decisions, projects or developments related to the national team that are not submitted, studied or analyzed by Guillermo Lara,” ESPN columnist Rafael Ramos Villagrana wrote in August 2012 “The only area where Lara cannot interfere is in the direct management of the national team on the pitch.”
That month, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warned the Mexican and Colombian authorities of money laundering in Mexican soccer, specifically at clubs Necaxa, Santos Laguna, Puebla and Salamanca FC. Further investigation by the Colombian authorities uncovered payments made by leading members of Colombia’s Norte del Valle Cartel to a number of prominent figures in the world of Mexican soccer.
Carlos Ahumada, the Argentine-Mexican businessman who then owned Santos and Club Leon, reportedly received $94,000 from the cartel, while Lara was allegedly paid $1.2 million. Martinez was also said to have been paid by the cartel, while the now-defunct Salamanca FC received two payments of $880,000 and $875,000.
Lara, who dismissed the allegations against him as “nonsense peddled by people who are unprofessional and unethical,” continues to work with the FMF, despite the Colombian authorities designating one of his companies under the Clinton List, a blacklist of people and businesses related to drug trafficking and money laundering.
“Thanks to Justino Compean, Lara enjoys total impunity, and he’ll surely dodge the accusations against him, as he has done in the past,” Ramos wrote for ESPN.
Lara is ever-present figure during international tournaments and even has access to the hotel rooms of the national team players, Ramos added. With the FMF unlikely to take any further action against him, it seems highly probable that a man with close links to known drug traffickers will not only continue to work on behalf of Mexico’s national team, but also accompany the squad to the World Cup in Brazil next week.
In September 2012, a month after the Colombian cartel payments were reported, Paola Portillo, a 27-year-old woman with alleged links to organized crime, was shot dead in Aguascalientes. Among her possessions, Portillo carried a folder containing the original contracts of Eisner Loboa and Hernan Burbano, Colombian footballers who were then playing for Leon. Both players and the club denied any knowledge of Portillo, but it was never explained why she was in possession of the contracts.
Eisner Loboa and Hernan Burbano’s contracts were found on the body of Paola Portillo, who was murdered in Aguascalientes in September 2012.
Loboa and Burbano both played a key role in securing Leon’s promotion to Mexico’s first division that summer and Burbano would also help club win the first of back-to-back championship titles the following year. However, despite Portillo’s death, there has been no investigation into the two Colombians’ transfers to Leon – further evidence that the FMF and the Mexican authorities are not doing enough to clamp down on money laundering in Mexican soccer.
The Tequila Files 