(Mexico City) Mexico is in mourning: its king of popular song and star of “mariachi” orchestras, Vicente Fernandez died on Sunday, the day of the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the country.
the crooner to sombreros and romances that rocked party nights and generations of broken hearts from Mexico to Argentina died at age 81 in a hospital in Guadalajara, the country’s second city, his family said on Instagram.
The absolute master of the “rancheras”, songs about the torments of love with several guitars and inevitable trumpets, had been hospitalized since a fall in early August in his ranch near Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco, cradle of tequila and stronghold of the most dangerous active drug cartel.
The sentimental and macho interpreter assumed to Por tu maldito amor and very bittersweet Que te vaya bonito has sold 70 million records in fifty years of a career spanning three Grammys and nine Latin Grammys.
Icon of a Mexico all in shadows and lights, refined and violent, “Chente” had known the tragedy of his life during a tour in 1998 when his son Vicente Fernandez Jr was kidnapped for 121 days against a demand for ransom of 10 million. dollars by a criminal gang who cut off two fingers.
One of his other sons would have been the friend of a capo of the Sinaloa cartel, according to the Argentinian journalist Olga Wornat who has just published a biography not authorized by the family, El ultimo rey.
With his boots, sideburns, thick eyebrows and mustache, the “Sinatra of music ranchera” – as the American newspaper has dubbed him. The houston chronicle in 1991 – hated fiercely one of his rivals who died in 2016, Juan Gabriel, “because he was homosexual and ‘Chente’ was a man from another era,” adds Olga Wornat.
Very symbolically, Fernandez bows out on the day when tens of thousands of pilgrims converge on the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the source of inspiration for the Mariachi orchestras. And the day a Guadalajara football club, Atlas, will try to win their first title in decades on Sunday night.
Among other multiple initial reactions, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador hailed a “symbol of ranchera music of our time, known and recognized in Mexico and abroad”.