The Mexican city of Chihuahua will be issuing fines for live performances of songs deemed to be misogynistic.
Artists could have to pay up to 1.2million pesos (£56,000) for playing lyrics that promote women’s “denigration, discrimination, marginalisation or exclusion” amid a “pandemic” of gender-based violence in the city.
According to the United Nations, ten women and girls are killed every day in Mexico. The city’s mayor, Marco Bonilla, recently said in a video posted to Facebook that seven out of every 10 calls made to Chihuahua’s emergency services were related to domestic violence, mostly against women. In addition, domestic violence rates in the city have been steeply rising.
He pledged in the video to donate the money collected from fining artists who break the regulations to women’s shelters or programmes to prevent violence against women and girls.
“Chihuahua is one of the five municipalities in the state with a gender alert, declared due to high rates of structural violence against women,” added councillor Patricia Ulate, the head of the city commission on women, families and gender equality (via the Guardian). “Any action that contributes to eradicating these circumstances counts.”
However, the move was criticised by Francisco Sánchez, a congressman for the wider Chihuahua state, who dismissed it as “useless and anachronistic”. Meanwhile, local media raised questions over whether it could affect future concerts by well-known reggaeton artists or performers of the popular genre of corridos tumbados, such as Peso Pluma and Bad Bunny.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, last month affirmed that musicians had the right to “sing whatever they want” but criticised artists who glorify violence and drug use. “We are not going to remain silent when they say that [ecstasy pills] are good and that they have a 50-calibre weapon, and that their idols are the most famous drug traffickers,” he said.
Chihuahua previously attempted to penalise live shows that featured songs which were seen to glorify drug crime. Los Tigres del Norte, a particularly popular Mexican band, were fined in 2017 for playing a narcocorrido, a song glorifying drug trafficking. However, the sanction had little effect on the band’s popularity.
