“Narco Polo” is the new fashion trend sweeping lower-class neighborhoods in Mexico, inspired by seven high-ranking drug traffickers who were arrested over a three-month stretch wearing open-neck, short-sleeved jerseys with the familiar horseman-with-a-stick emblem.
The polo shirts are becoming ubiquitous in street vendors’ stalls from the drug-war-ravaged state of Tamaulipas to the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, Sinaloa.
Demand is so high that a Mexico City street vendor named Felipe stocks several colors, and names them after the drug lord who was wearing that color at the time of his arrest.
“This is the ‘J.J,’’’ he says, pointing to a blue one, “and this is ‘La Barbie,’” indicating a green number. That was a reference to Jose Jorge (“J.J.’’) Balderas, who allegedly dealt drugs and shot soccer star Salvador Cabanas in the head, and to US-born Edgar Valdez Villarreal, “La Barbie.”
Despite their Ralph Lauren labels, the shirts on sale on Mexico City streets for 160 pesos (US$13.50) are clearly pirated goods, sold by unlicensed vendors like Felipe who don’t want their full names used for fear of attracting police attention.
But some of Felipe’s customers have their first names embroidered on the back of the shirts, a service he offers for an extra fee, as a sort of dare.
It’s probably not the demographic that designers at Ralph Lauren were thinking of for their polo shirts. The company did not respond to several requests for comment about the shirts’ popularity in Mexican criminal circles.
The shirt La Barbie wore when captured appeared to be the only potentially authentic one of the bunch. The rest of the drug traffickers appeared to be wearing cheap knockoffs of the US$98 to US$145 Ralph Lauren “Big Pony” jerseys.
The shirt is becoming so pervasive that it provoked public grumbling from Sinaloa Governor Mario Lopez Valdez.
“Now you see how these shirts like La Barbie’s have become the fashion,” said Lopez Valdez. While he didn’t suggest an outright ban, he told a local radio station that “I think we have to close off everything that promotes criminal behavior.”
He complained that the fad glorifies traffickers.
“Many young people want to emulate them as idols in some way ... and they want to be drug traffickers. And there are a lot of young girls who want to be the girlfriends of drug traffickers.”
But it may not be sheer adulation; wearing the shirts may also be a way for youths to thumb their noses at authority, a time-honored pastime among young people around the world.
“To the police, it’s a message that says ‘I could be a drug trafficker and walk right in front of you and you can’t say anything to me because I’m just wearing a shirt,’” said Oscar Galicia Castillo, a psychologist at the IberoAmerican University who studies prison inmates. “Many youths are also using it as a way of making fun of snobbish status markers.”
For Pedro, who sells snacks at a stand on a downtown Mexico City street, his light blue polo shirt just represents an indefinable sense of cool. He said the shirts had become all the rage in his tough neighborhood of Tepito, and that his wife bought him one as a surprise.
“It looks good. It gives you class,” he said. He declined to give his last name, saying police had recently caught him selling cigarettes to minors.
In some rough barrios, a shirt that conveys a vague sense of menace and a “don’t mess with me” attitude may be helpful.
“The guys who buy them want people to think they’re tough,” said Cesar, a counterfeit-shirt vendor who said most of the customers at his downtown Mexico City stall are young males. “It’s about putting on a look.’’
For at least two decades, Mexicans have fretted about youths emulating drug traffickers, from the days when narcos favored the designs of Versace and exotic-leather boots, or marijuana-leaf insignia on belt buckles, shirts and baseball caps. But such trends remained largely regional, and were derided as tacky.
But the new fashion trend has been helped along by a new, more urbane and sophisticated generation of drug traffickers, who dress more like Mexico’s wealthier classes.
Last year, Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of drug lord Vicente “El Mayo” Zambada, was arrested in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood wearing a preppy ensemble of sports coat, jeans and striped cotton shirt.
Vicente Carrillo Leyva, the son of another drug lord, was collared around the same time wearing a jogging suit emblazoned with the name “Abercrombie.”
Media coverage also can promote the trend. Newly captured capos are paraded before television cameras wearing the latest narco-fashion, often with beautiful girlfriends at their sides. Authorities allow some, like J.J., to sit down for interviews looking self-assured, fit and unrepentant.
“My business improved. Everybody wanted to work with me,” Balderas said of the notoriety he achieved while a wanted man.
It wouldn’t be the first time designers have faced an unexpected market. Uber-preppy designer Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes became a must-have item for inner-city youths a few years ago.
For Galicia Castillo, the psychologist, it’s all about standing out, identifying oneself as a member of a certain sector of a crowded world, probably much the same reason people shell out US$145 for the original: “That’s why I wear it, so that everyone will look at me, will see that I can afford this. And I could be a narco, so don’t mess with me.”
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS