How did the word “Chief of Chiefs” come about in the field of drug trafficking

When you use the word “Chief of Bosses”, you usually think of two things: the famous song by Los Tigres del Norte and the nickname that has been associated with numerous drug lords, from Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo to Amado Carrillo Fuentes. In any case, it refers to the world of narcoculture in Mexico.

However, the song that was released in 1997 on the album of the same name by the northern band and that even won a Platinum Record in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America for exceeding one million sales was written by Teodoro Bello and his intentions were far removed from mentioning criminal groups.

In an interview he held with Elijah Wald, a cultural historian, the Mexican composer explained that the subject has to do, first of all, with the conception that “people must be great”, so that the protagonist of Chief of Bosses is not a criminal, but a professional —whether it's a taxi driver, a shoemaker or a fireman- who enjoys a position of power in the field in which it operates.

A similar explanation was given in the program El arte de la Canción, when he detailed that “the corrido is not born for a drug trafficker, he is born for a great person who is dedicated to his work and who is dedicated to producing talent, strength, greatness.” So how has the audience associated this song, and the word in particular, with the world of drug trafficking?

Journalist Oswaldo Zavala, in his most recent book The War in the Words (Debate, 2022), explains how the word “Chief of Chiefs” went from being an “empty signifier” to a reference in narcoculture in Mexico and Latin America, not only because of its cultural representations, as in the song by Los Tigres del Norte or the Netflix television series Narcos: Mexico, but also in the narrative configuration of the Mexican national security discourse.

Before becoming popular in song form, the word “Boss of Chiefs” was previously used in a report by Newsweek magazine published in 1985, which mentioned that the “chief chief of the cocaine industry in Mexico” was Juan Matta, a Honduran trafficker who operated on the continent for the decades of 1970 and 1980, mainly.

According to Zavala, it was in 1990 that the word “boss” began to be used more frequently in reports on drug trafficking in Mexico, especially those published in the United States. According to political scientist M. Delal Baer, drug stories published in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal rose from 338 in 1991 to 538 in the early months of 1997.

This was due, in part, to the notoriety that the Juarez Cartel was beginning to gain in the media. According to Oswaldo Zavala, Carillo Fuentes was the first drug trafficker conceived “as the central object of the new doctrine of national security”, so that the only Mexican trafficker at that time who could be identified as the closest model of the 1997 race was precisely The Lord of the Skies.

However, after the death of Carrillo Fuentes (precisely in 1997, when the song and album of Los Tigres del Norte were released) the “'chief of chiefs' depends rather on a nominal fluency that refers to a 'narco' as to all the 'narcos' before and after him,” Zavala points out. Since then, the word Chief of Chiefs has been reconfigured countless times and attributed to various drug traffickers: from the well-known Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, to more recently Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, according to journalist Diego Enrique Osorno.

But before being attributed to a particular criminal, the word “Chief” in the field of drug trafficking is used, mainly, in the discourse of the federal authorities as a way of designating a criminal figure that violates the national security of a country (in this case Mexico), points out the also professor of culture from the City University of New York (CUNY).

Thus, in the security narrative, the word originates from the official speeches of the security authorities who circulated it in the media during the so-called war on drugs so that it was integrated into the collective imagination of society. In this way, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, at the time, was described as that “Chief of Chiefs”.

However, on the other hand, there is an ambiguity in the attribution of the figure “Chief of Chiefs”, so that its meaning is polysemic, so that the leader of a cartel can hold that position, as could a professional or political actor. “The concept, without being linked to any real character in any decisive way, can be reactivated again and again with the face of any trafficker or political figure,” Zavala explains.

According to the origin of its use, the word “chief of chiefs” “disauthorizes Mexico's political sovereignty” by integrating into the national security narrative an empowered trafficker who has surpassed the highest levels of government. Over time, cultural representations of drug trafficking have used this concept to refer to this or that drug trafficker who has subjected the State to its own order. “In any of its versions, the State appears overtaken, violated and submitted,” concludes Oswaldo Zavala.

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