How a Peruvian President’s Bawdy Texts Became a Viral Sensation

It’s embarrassing enough to have one’s sexy texts with an illicit lover leaked for all the world to see. It’s even worse when you are a former president and the texts get turned into a catchy YouTube ditty that goes viral.The former president who’s in this spot is Peru’s Martin Vizcarra, who left office in 2020. He finds himself there after his texts with a former congressional candidate and alleged mistress, Zully Pinchi, were leaked to Peru’s muckraking equivalent of “60 Minutes.”In the texts, Ms. Pinchi refers to Mr. Vizcarra as, “Mi bebito, fiu fiu,” or “My baby,” with the two appended words meant to mimic a whistling catcall.A Peruvian songwriter and producer famous for political parody songs, Alberto Silva Reyes — better known as Tito Silva — took the texts and, with the help of a singer Tefi C, turned them into a song that has captured the Spanish-speaking world by storm.A Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar, Bad Bunny, hummed a few bars during one of his wildly popular Instagram Live sessions earlier this month, and a Spanish soccer behemoth, Real Madrid, used it as background on one of its TikTok videos.Marvel studios used it to promote its new “Thor” movie — referring to lead actor Chris Helmsworth as “our little baby fiu fiu” — and the song briefly made it to the top of Spotify’s Viral 50 ranking of the world’s top songs before being taken down as a potential copyright infringement.At one point, “Mi bebito fiu fiu” was more popular on Spotify than Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill,” the summer’s out-of-nowhere hit thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack for Netflix’s “Stranger Things.” The music behind the lyrics borrows heavily from a 2000 Eminem song, “Stan,” itself a remix of the English songstress Dido’s “Thank you,” which is why the song was briefly removed from most streaming services. The lyrics, however, are pure Vizcarra-Pinchi.In one of the texts, allegedly sent after a liaison at a high-end hotel in Cusco where the couple reportedly registered under fake names, Ms. Pinchi wrote to Mr. Vizcarra, “I love you and I need to give you a hug. You don’t know how much I miss you. You are my baby and my king.” In another, she pleads with the former president to “soak me in chocolate and roll me in powdered sugar.”Both Ms. Pinchi and Mr. Vizcarra, who has been married to the same woman for 30 years and has four children with her, have denied the affair. The substance of the texts was first reported by Panorama in mid-May, and Mr. Silva’s video surfaced shortly afterward. Within Peru, it was an instant hit, rocketing from social media networks like Facebook and Instagram onto local radio stations, television networks, and the sound systems of dance clubs at the capital, Lima.On TikTok, the video’s success was even more meteoric. In a matter of days, tens of thousands of users had used the song in their own posts and the original racked up millions of views. On YouTube, there are now hundreds of versions of the song with tens of millions of views. The singer, Tefi C, has been on the talk-show circuit and doing concerts across Latin America.By Monday, the song had reappeared on Spotify but was credited to a new author — Mr. Vizcarra. Mr. Reyes, for his part, released a new version of the song with a salsa beat fronted by a Peruvian singer named Hugo Congas. Half a million people have listened to it already.

How a Peruvian President’s Bawdy Texts Became a Viral Sensation

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