MEXICO CITY -- Alex Moreno stepped into the spotlight, a half-dozen mariachis in silver and black sombreros behind him, and brought the microphone to his lips.
"We don't want to sing anymore about your poisoned war, with verses and rhymes that lead innocent children to believe your lies," he crooned in Spanish over the blare of horns and violins.
"More of us are awake," he sang, "and we're tired of your stories."
That "Anticorrido," written by Moreno and performed before a panel of judges in a Mexico City television studio, would not have been out of place on "American Idol," the Eurovision Song Contest or "The Voice."
But the 30-year-old's performance, broadcast on public television to millions here during prime time, was part of something greater: a government effort to push back on Mexico's narcocorridos -- the popular ballads that narrate tales of the country's cartel leaders and often celebrate their exploits.
"It's a kind of music that condones violence," said Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico's secretary of culture. "So this is a response to avoid normalizing expressions that glorify violence and paint narco-trafficking as a way of life."
About a third of Mexico's 32 states have banned or limited the public performance or broadcast of narcocorridos. The federal government is taking a different approach.
"Mexico Sings," run with help from several big names in the Mexican recording industry, features young people from across Mexico and the United States competing on live TV to promote "clean and safe" music as an alternative to narcocorridos.
But with 4 million people tuning in, the government's decision to counter the violence ravaging the country -- as President Donald Trump demands action -- in part with a talent show is drawing questions both political and aesthetic.
Luis Astorga, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says it seemed like an attempt by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to show that she is fighting the cartels without getting at the root of the problem.
"It only makes sense in political terms," he said. "They're more preoccupied with this kind of music than with the conditions that generate the violence captured in this music."
The United States, too, has confronted Mexican artists over narcocorridos. The State Department revoked the tourist and work visas of one band, Los Alegres del Barranco, after it flashed images of the notorious Jalisco New Generation cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes onstage in the spring. In August, Treasury Department officials announced sanctions on the narco-rapper El Makabelico, who they alleged was using his shows to launder money for the Cartel del Noreste.
"The last thing we need is a welcome mat for people who extol criminals and terrorists," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote on X.
Astorga, who has studied the drug trade, maintained that no amount of sanctions or control efforts will stop musicians from writing narcocorridos -- or audiences from flocking to them -- as long as they reflect something true about Mexico.
"If your lived reality is showing you violence, that's what you're going to narrate or listen to," he said.
Moreno said he was inspired to pen his three-part song, a critique of narcocorrido culture and its place in Mexican music, after seeing bodies left hanging on highway overpasses in his hometown, Chihuahua -- a tactic employed by organized criminals in Mexico to display power, intimidate or terrorize.
When he heard about Sheinbaum promoting the contest in her daily news conferences, he knew he wanted to enter. That much was clear toward the end of his performance, when he switched to a spoken interlude.
"This really is Mexican music," Moreno said, to cheers from the studio audience. "More of us are the good guys."
Corridos, tales of patriots and bandits set to the strum of guitars and the jabs of trumpets, have been ubiquitous in Mexican regional music at least as far back as the 1800s. They recounted stories of the Mexican Revolution or Robin Hood-style folk heroes in rural towns that suffered poverty and crime.
And when the drug trade boomed across Mexico late last century, singers began writing about traffickers and their adventures, too.
Government officials, concerned about a rise in drug-related violence, pushed back. Some states fined radio stations for playing narcocorridos.
The effort mostly failed, said Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, a professor at San Diego State University. Fans passed songs around on CDs or online. Cartels themselves commissioned more narcocorridos, generating more rebellious interest.
"What any notion of censorship does is to incentivize just the opposite," said Ramírez-Pimienta, who studies corridos, narcoculture and violence in Mexican music. "The result of that is that people will actually look for it."
The same effect appeared to play out with the more recent rise of corridos tumbados, which overlay narco-inspired lyrics on trap beats reminiscent of gangsta rap.
Take the singer Peso Pluma, who became the country's most famous narcocorrido singer at 23 with music videos in which he wears bulletproof vests and wields guns -- and a song performed from the perspective of a henchman for the Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo.
In 2023, banners appeared in Tijuana ahead of a Peso Pluma concert warning that if he dared appear onstage in the border city, the performance would be his last. City leaders subsequently banned narcocorridos.
Since then, he has grown only more popular. Last year, he was Spotify's seventh-most-streamed artist worldwide.
"Corridos have always been very attacked and very demonized," he told the Associated Press after a 2023 set at Coachella. "At the end of the day, it's music."
More recently, the singer Luis R. Conriquez told fans before an April performance in Mexico state that a government ban would prevent him from singing any narcocorridos.
"We've entered a new phase, my people, without corridos and all that," he wrote on social media ahead of the show. "It feels ugly not be able to sing what people want to hear, but we'll join the cause for no corridos and move forward."
The crowd that night rioted. Fans shouted for him to play his biggest hits, threw bottles and invaded the stage to break instruments.
Sheinbaum's predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, attempted to address criminal violence here by funding programs for social and economic development. The approach, which he called "abrazos, no balazos" -- hugs not bullets -- aimed to give young people an alternative to working for the cartels.
López Obrador's six-year term was the bloodiest in Mexican history. Murders reached a historic peak, disappearances rose, and impunity remained the norm.
Sheinbaum has embraced a more aggressive approach. A year into office, she has increased drug and gun seizures, transferred dozens of imprisoned cartel leaders to the U.S., and -- apparently to appease Trump -- added thousands of troops to patrol the northern border.
But she has also repeatedly expressed her opposition to banning narcocorridos, opting instead for alternate tactics such as the song contest, the full name of which is "Mexico sings for peace and against addictions."
Curiel, the culture secretary, told The Washington Post that their effort "is not about banning anything."
"We're not telling [contestants] what they need to talk about," she said. "We know that art is dissident and critical and that freedom is fundamental in artistic matters."
She cast the effort as a victory already. Fifteen thousand people have entered. Judges whittled the number down to about 40 semifinalists, who were invited to rehearse in studios and perform in front of a small studio audience.
Each week's episode shows contestants from one of six geographic regions in Mexico or the U.S., one of whom advances to the finale next month. The top three finishers in the competition will win year-long recording contracts.
Among the contestants, there's no consensus on how the government should address narco violence.
Susy Ortuño, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter from the city of Apatzingán, has felt the impact of cartels personally.
Two of her uncles were drug traffickers who were killed. Her father was jailed in the U.S. for 15 years for trafficking -- an absence that first prompted her to busk on the street with her brother for cash. She left her job as a music teacher near Apatzingán a few years ago, when cartels made the area too dangerous for her to work.
Her song entry is not about any of those topics -- it's about a breakup with an ex -- but she said she would support any strategy that brought an end to the havoc wrought by cartels.
"That's something that I think we all want," she said. "We all want to stop having to feel this so close to home."
Days after getting a call from producers informing her she had made the first cut, she said, two severed heads were found in the town center in Apatzingán.
No song, no ban and no contest, she said, would fix that horror.