Song angers Mexican mothers

Mothers of young women murdered in a northern Mexico border city are up in arms over a new song by a popular regional band that they say is making money off their daughters’ brutal killings.

More than 330 young women have been killed in the last decade in Ciudad Juarez, a grim industrial city bordering El Paso, in a case that has provoked outrage at home and abroad. Few of the killings have been solved.

Los Tigres del Norte (Tigers of the North), whose songs, known as “corridos,” chronicle aspects of border life, has angered the victims’ mothers by writing a song about the deaths.

“The mothers say it’s profiting from a tragedy. They don’t want it coming out on the radio,” Victoria Caraveo, head of the Chihuahua Women’s Institute, said Wednesday.

The ballad “The Women of Juarez,” released on the band’s new album “Pact of Blood,” eulogizes the women and discusses the failure to prosecute the killers, saying “the deaths of Ciudad Juarez are a national shame.”

Paula Flores, whose daughter was stabbed and strangled, said it was insensitive of Mexico’s famous northern band to sing about such a painful topic without consulting the families.

A spokeswoman for Fonovisa, the label for which Los Tigres del Norte records, responded, “People aren’t paying attention to what what the song says. It’s a song calling for action. It’s not a song trying to profit” from the deaths.