Mexico's country music stars are being killed at an alarming rate - 13 in the past year-and-a-half, three already in December - in a trend that has gone hand in hand with the surge in violence between drug gangs here.
None of the cases has been solved. All have borne the signs of Mexican underworld executions, sending a chill through the ranks of other grupero musicians, who sing to a country beat about love, violence and drugs in modern Mexico.
One of the most shocking attacks came when Sergio Gomez, the founder and lead singer of K-Paz de la Sierra, was kidnapped while leaving a concert in his home state of Michoacan early on Sunday morning, Dec. 9.
His body was found the next day dumped on a roadside outside this city, the state capital. He had been beaten, tortured with a cigarette lighter, then strangled with a plastic cord, officials said. He was 34 and had just been nominated for a Grammy Award.
"We don't understand why this happened," his uncle, Froylan Gomez, said in an interview. "He never did anyone any harm."
The motives for the killings remain a matter of speculation, and no evidence has been found to link them to a single killer. In some cases, the musicians appeared to have ties to organized crime figures, making them potential targets in reprisal attacks from rival gangs.
Others had composed songs known as narcocorridos, ballads glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which sometimes offend other drug dealers and hit men. In still other cases, as the musicians' fame grew, they seemed to have become embroiled with criminals unwittingly.
"Sometimes there is a direct relationship between the musician and the narcotics trafficker," Miguel Olmos, a musicologist at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana, said. "But also there are a lot of passionate crimes. That is to say, the musician establishes some sort of sentimental relationship with people who are linked to this culture of violence and of narcotics trafficking and somehow it gets out of hand. They always touch some nerve of the trafficker."
In the case of Gomez, who was best known for his stirring love songs, prosecutors are investigating whether he had ties to organized crime. So far, however, the investigation into his abduction has been a morass of conflicting accounts, missing witnesses and loose ends unlikely to be tied up soon.
Investigators have yet to interview the two music industry impresarios with Gomez when he was kidnapped, nor have they interviewed the other members of his group. "We hope we can locate all these people," said Maria Elena Cornejo Chavez, the assistant attorney general of Michoacan state. "It's very complicated for us because they all left the state."
The killings have been particularly brutal. On Dec. 13, Jose Luis Aquino, 33, a trumpet player with Los Conde, was found beaten to death in Oaxaca state, with a plastic bag over his head and his hands and feet tied.
On Dec. 1, Zayda Pena, the raven-haired lead singer of Zayda y los Culpables, was shot in a motel room in Matamoros in Tamaulipas state. She survived the attack, but the killers followed her to the hospital and finished her off with two more bullets as she lay in bed. She was 28.
"We are in shock, because it's a weird thing that in one week three members of the grupero wave would be killed," Jose Angel Medina, the leader of the group Patrulla 81, said to reporters after the recent killings. "We are afraid because we are superexposed and this could keep going. We don't know who's next."
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