A prosecutor in the province of Buenos Aires on Tuesday rejected a request for the release of one of Argentina’s most popular rappers. Elián Valenzuela, 23, will remain in prison after his arrest last Tuesday. He is accused of threatening a neighbor of his family with a gun and kidnapping him after a nightclub brawl on May 27. “If I don’t win, I’d rather not win,” he wrote in a letter shared with his five million Instagram followers on Monday. The latest of his legal troubles gets him in trouble.
As the biggest exponent of the new Argentine cumbia niche, L-Gante became one of the most popular people in the country in July 2021. This was thanks to a compliment from Cristina Kirchner. Speaking at a school in Buenos Aires, the former president quoted an interview in which the musician said he recorded and edited his first viral hit on one of the state-distributed computers in public schools. “Elegant,” as the Vice President called it, is a good example of how the five million laptops distributed by the Casa Rosada between 2010 and 2015 could be used for young people to “start businesses” or “their artistic qualities to discover. “I recommend you listen to it,” Kirchner advised. “He says that using the Connect Equality he received in 2014 and a small microphone, he made a song that has 176 million views on YouTube today.”
The Vice-President wanted the story of a young man who was born into poverty and changed his fortunes to support one of her policies to be heard, but the opposition press took it as an endorsement of songs promoting drug use, promiscuity and incite misogyny. One of the most influential journalists on the Argentine right, Eduardo Feinmann, called him “the new icon of Christian culture” and eventually invited him to his show.
L-Gante denied the vice president, saying that he actually received the Equality Connect computer from a friend because he had already left school. “Can you sing?” asked the rapper Feinmann right at the beginning of the interview. “Neither do I,” he said to him without waiting for an answer, and stunned him for half an hour. From the anecdote that he started using drugs at the age of 15 to the detailed description of the small house he lived with his mother on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, they were all smiles.
2021 was the year of L-Ghent. In March he recorded a song at the most famous music studio in the world, that of Bizarrap; in July it was the news of the month; in October he was received by President Alberto Fernández; In December, he moved to a private neighborhood with his girlfriend and their one-year-old daughter. He was arrested at the same place last Tuesday.
On May 27, one of his former neighbors from the General Rodríguez community, on the western outskirts of Buenos Aires, alleged that the rapper pointed a gun at him in the early hours of the morning and forced him to get into his car that morning. It happened after a fight between him and L-Gante’s friends at a local nightclub. According to the complaint, the man, Gastón Torres, was forced into the musician’s car at gunpoint and kidnapped for almost half an hour while he made sure his friends were out of trouble with the police. “Prepare a small field for me so that we can kill him there,” L-Gante said in a telephone conversation while accompanying his hostage, according to the Telam news agency. On June 6, he was arrested after four searches at his home.
L-Gent has just been held in a police investigation unit for a week while his relatives and fans camped outside. This Tuesday, the prosecutor handling his case refused to release him while the investigation continues. It’s not his first problem with the law: he was arrested in March 2021 for disrupting public roads and in February 2022 for intimidating a young man with a firearm again. His lawyer denounces the merciless treatment of the singer by the police and the mobilization in front of the detention center demands the release of the last hero of modesty, who sings about the social reality of a country where 40% of the population lives in poverty and exclusion .
In an audio recording leaked to the press, his complainant assures that the threats have not stopped throughout the week: “They even threaten my 13-year-old daughter. It’s a shame. We don’t know what to do, if we go out they threaten us and if we stay they throw stones at our house.”
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