Narco Cultura

Photojournalist Shaul Schwarz’s powerful documentary “Narco Cultura” gets inside the world of two men who, in very different ways, inhabit this horror. Edgar Quintero is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and frontman for the band Buknas de Culiacán. He compares his narcocorridos to gangsta rap (as do others). He is often hired to compose personally crafted songs for drug lords.Richie Soto is a crime-scene investigator in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, ground zero in the drug-cartel wars and often described as the murder capital of the world. In 2007 there were 320 murders in Juárez. By 2010, the number had risen to 3,622. El Paso, Texas, across the river from Juárez, had five murders in that same year.Schwarz, without being schematic about it, cuts back and forth between these two men and their opposing lives. Quintero, with a beaming wife and young child, is an affable go-getter. He and his band mates dress up for concerts in gang regalia, sometimes toting fake AK 47's

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