Drug insurgents go after singers in Mexico?

Houston Chronicle:

Apart from the police and narco-gangsters, few groups of people have suffered more in Mexico's brutal drug wars than the singers whose music often chronicles the carnage.

The latest casualty appears to be Zayda Peña, 28, a singer who was shot dead Saturday in a hospital emergency room in the city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville.

An assassin put two bullets into Peña shortly after she emerged from emergency surgery for a gunshot wound to the back she received the day before in a motel where she was staying.

Although police said they they had no suspects or motive for the killing, it seemed a classic gangland-style slaying that has killed hundreds of people in Mexico this year.

Two people — a friend of Peña's and the motel manager — were killed in the initial attack on her, shortly before midnight Friday.

Peña — the front woman in a band named Zayda y los Culpables, or "Zayda and the Guilty Ones" — enjoyed a following on both sides of the border playing music known as grupero, which features basses, electric guitar, drums, accordions and synthesizers.

Grupero lyrics focus on love, unrequited or not, and on the exploits of narcotics gangsters and other borderlands themes. The genre's bands are popular draws in dance halls across provincial Mexico. Gangsters are said to be among the bands' many fans.

Although one of her songs, Tiro de Gracia, or "Coup de Grace," the term used for the final shot to the brain in an execution-style killing, Peña's songs focus mostly on romance. They can be heard on YouTube by searching for Zayda y Los Culpables.

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Peña's death came little more than a year after singer Valentin Elizalde was shot and killed in the border city of Reynosa, 60 miles upriver from Matamoros, shortly after performing a concert.

In February, four members of another grupero band were shot to death after playing a hall in central Michoacan state, where much of this year's gangland violence has occurred.

Another popular grupero singer was gunned down in a Michoacan park last December.

Mexican newspapers last weekend reported that the lead singer of yet another band went missing Saturday, along with two businessmen, following a performance in Morelia, the Michoacan state capital.

Peña's slaying also came two days after a hit-team assassinated a former mayor in Rio Bravo, another border city about 30 miles up river from Matamoros. Juan Guajardo, 48, was killed along with two federal police bodyguards and three other men in the assault on a downtown street. Four bystanders were seriously wounded.

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This is hard to comprehend. If they did not like the music, just don't attend their performance. That is how the free market is supposed to work.

What might make some sense would be a hit on someone in a relationship with a rival group of drug insurgents. Whatever the reason, the persons responsible were determined to not let her survive her hospital visit caused by the first attempt. My guess is that the killers may have been fearful of what would happen to themselves if they did not deliver on their contract.

This story suggest Peña may have been in an affair with the suspects former girl friend.

The BBC has a story on the kidnapping and strangulation of Sergio Gomez.

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Sergio Gomez, of the K-Paz de la Sierra band, was seized after a concert in the western state of Michoacan on Sunday.

The motive for the attack is unclear but Michoacan has been the scene of gruesome drug-related violence.

Several musicians have been killed over the year, including performers of the popular "narcorrido" music whose lyrics recounts tales of drug-trafficking.

Gomez and several others were travelling in a car in the early hours of Sunday after K-Paz de la Sierra's concert in Morelia, Michoacan's capital, when they were kidnapped by armed men.

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Random acts of terror have their purpose and that could be all these attacks are, but they are more than passing strange.