Mystery of murdered Mexican musicians continues

NY Times:

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 have 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 Gómez, the founder and lead singer of K-Paz de la Sierra, was kidnapped while leaving a concert in his home state of Michoacán early on the morning of Dec. 2.

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, Froylán Gómez, 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 ballads known as narcocorridos, glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which can offend other drug dealers and hit men. In still other cases, as the musicians’ fame grew, they may have become embroiled with criminals unwittingly.

“Sometimes there is a direct relationship between the musician and the narcotics trafficker,” said Miguel Olmos, a musicologist at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “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 Mr. Gómez, 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 impresarios with Mr. Gómez when he was kidnapped, nor have they interviewed the other members of his group. “We hope we can locate all these people,” said María Elena Cornejo Chávez, the assistant attorney general of Michoacán State. “It’s very complicated for us because they all left the state.”

The killings have been particularly brutal. On Thursday, José 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 Peña, 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,” José Ángel Medina, the leader of the group Patrulla 81, told 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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There is more, but they are not any closer to an answer than we were a few weeks ago when first reporting the wave of murders. The Times speculation is pretty close to mine, but the police in Mexico are not finding much less protecting the witnesses who might know something. So far no one is singing to the cops.