Bad Bunny’s Concert in Mexico Sold Out, But Many Ticket Holders Were Turned Away

Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is known for his eccentric style, feminist lyrics and reggaeton beats infused with the Caribbean sounds of salsa and mambo and is known to pour his heart into his shows. It is not just an evening of entertainment, it is an experience: Aerial videos from recent concerts show crowds jumping so hard in unison that they look like they are in a giant wave pool at a water park while flame throwers go off around them.

Not all of his Mexican fans were unlucky last weekend.

Claudia Murillo, 38, took her 8 year-old son to the show and said it took about an hour to get in. Ms. Murillo, a medical device consultant, was disappointed that she had been booted from the Ticketmaster website last spring when she tried to line up online to buy tickets when they were officially released.

After losing her place on Ticketmaster’s website, she ended up buying tickets from a scalper for 9,000 pesos each, about $455, three times the official price.

On Friday night, she and her son had to push through a crowd of angry people to get to the entrance.

“A girl behind me started to pray as we saw all these people walking toward the exit, angry and shouting that they had been denied,” Ms. Murillo said. “The girl was saying, ‘God, I have never asked you for anything. If there is one thing I ask you for in my life is to get into this concert.’”

When Ms. Murillo and her son finally entered the stadium they discovered a half empty floor.

Ms. Rodriguez, who works jobs as a night guard and in a veterinary clinic, said she has been told that she will be reimbursed the cost of her ticket, which she had to use her savings to pay for. But she recalls meeting another Bad Bunny fan amid the chaos last week, who had traveled to the capital from over 600 miles away from the Mexican city of Torreon. That fan, Ms. Rodriguez said, will never recoup all the money she spent on hotels, flights and accommodation to attend a concert she never got into.

Many people saved their salaries and “wanted to spend it on an experience that was important to them,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “I paid so much, for nothing.”