When he confessed to disposing of three film students in vats of acid, the sweet-voiced 27-year-old Mexican rapper QBA proved to be a kind of Tupac in reverse.
Tupac Shakur played the street gangsta and had THUG LIFE tattooed across his chest, but dropped the pose when he got a taste of the real thing behind bars.
“Prison kills your spirit,” he said in a jail interview. “And you can die here.”
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Tupac added, “Do not to come to jail. Jail is not the spot.”
Christian “QBA” Palma Gutiérrez appears in 67 videos on YouTube watched by millions to be a sensitive soul, a rapper who might have a HUG LIFE tattoo. He invokes the pain and grief that accompany violence and he sees no romance in the suffering streets. His lament in “La Muerte No Tiene Horario,” or “Death Has No Schedule,” translates to:
“Here in the neighborhood, daily shots are heard.
They are different things that happen to us, but mothers cry at home.”
The real-life mothers now crying real-life tears include the mothers of 23-year-old Javier Salomón Aceves Gastélum, 20-year-old Marco Garcia Francisco Avalos and 20-year-old Jesús Daniel. The three young men set out in March from La Universidad de Medios Audiovisuale in Guadalajara to spend a long weekend working on a film project at a house in Jalisco.
The house belongs to an aunt of one of the young men, who were apparently unaware that it had once served as a hangout for the Nueva Plaza gang. Nueve Plaza is at war with the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Once the armed wing of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel, the CJNG has embarked on its own and become the most powerful criminal organization in Mexico. The CJNG is headed by Reuben Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho.
With El Chapo extradited to the U.S. and awaiting trial in New York, El Mencho has risen to preeminence by equally murderous means. His henchmen spotted the three filmmakers at the aunt’s house and decided they were Nueva Plaza members.
The filmmakers were departing when their car broke down and two CJNG hitmen wearing police uniforms appeared. The hitmen forced the students into another vehicle and drove off.
At a CJNG hangout, the hitmen proceeded to beat and torture one of the students so ferociously that he died. They apparently decided to kill the remaining two as well so there would be no witnesses.
There then arose the problem of the corpses. The hitmen are said to have left that to QBA, who had signed on with CJNG three months before at a weekly salary of 3,000 pesos, or $159.
Mexican authorities say that QBA later confessed to dissolving the bodies in vats of acid. The authorities would further allege that this was not the only time he was party to homicide.
"He has participated in three other previous murders," a senior investigator told the press.
The disappearance of the three students had prompted thousands of protesters to take to the streets. Social media called attention to #LosTresEstudiantesDeCine. Word of their horrific fate prompted a tweet from Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, who comes from Guadalajara, as does QBA.
“Words can’t explain the dimension of this madness. 3 students are killed and dissolved in acid. The ‘why’ is unthinkable, the ‘how’ is terrifying,” he wrote in Spanish.
Anybody who now watched a QBA video had cause to feel the rapper was all the more a monster for having not seemed to be one. The reality imparts far more than irony to the 2016 video “Descansa en Paz,” or “Rest in Peace,” in which QBA stands over a rope-bound man who writhes on the floor with a bloody hood over his head. QBA seems horrified by his own actions as he gazes down at his bloody hands. The fingers are trembling.
QBA then proceeds to douse his victim with gasoline and set him on fire. The lyrics are not those of a rapper who had made himself his own hero, but rather someone who seems to have become his own enemy.
“My voice will be the home of calm in peace to torment the darkness,” he raps in Spanish.
QBA does wear gold in some videos and in one wears a t-shirt emblazoned with an automatic weapon, but he does not boast and the backdrop is most often grinding poverty. Violence is usually preceded and followed by despair.
He conveys his vision of the future with the image of a kid not more than five years old flashing a gang sign. He seems to be stating simple fact as he raps in Male Vido, Bad Life, which has had 1.6 million views.
“Bad life surrounds the family,
Bad life surrounds the neighborhood,
Bad life surrounds every one.”
His most recent video was “Humildemente Bandido,” or “Humble Bandit,” posted in February. He was expected to appear as the headliner at the big Rap Fest 664 on Tijuana on April 29. The event has reportedly been canceled now that the sweet-voiced main attraction has been charged placing three filmmaking students in vats of acid and participating in three other murders.
“No one gets entangled without consequences,” QBA raps in “Humble Bandit.”
And the grieving mothers include those of the three innocents Mexican authorities say QBA helped murder after they became unwittingly entangled through no fault of their own.
QBA is no poser. But at least Tupac was never arrested for being party to homicide. A fake is always better than an actual monster with vats of acid, no matter how genuine his art.
