Mexico's Country Music Stars Incresing Targets of Murders

For entirely unclear and confounding reasons, Mexico's country music (grupero) stars are being murdered at an alarming rate. Already as many as 13 have been killed this year, and they aren't even little-known performers. The most recent murder of Sergio Gomez on December 2 (in which his body was found with burn marks from torture and then killed with plastic wire) was a member of K-Paz, one of Mexico's more popular grupero groups. In another case, a failed attempt on the life of Zayda Pena Arjona led to her hospitalization, where the following day hitmen still entered the hospital and killed her with two shots to the head.

Official explanations are sparse, and the authorities are really puzzled on this. The lyrics of the dead may have had some cause, as many of them sang narcocorridos, or songs about the drug trade (not always in a bad way). Officials suspect the lyrics here and there may have angered some drug lords, yet Gomez, whose group K-Paz doesn't really have many such songs, has confused authorities further. Besides the lyrical content, the only possible suspicions autorities have on the issue is the possibility that some of these musicians were tied to organized crime (knowingly or unknowingly). However, there is absolutely nothing concrete to point to any of this - it is all just suspicion, making the cases even more bizarre and difficult to understand or solve.

What is really frustrating in all this is the blatant open war on one of Mexico's major cultural forms. Grupero music is part of the rich legacy and tradition of Norteño music in Mexico, expressing love and murder in ways not totally unlike early murder-ballads and country and blues music of the early 20th century. It isn't just terrible that a particularly rich expression of Mexican culture is under attack. Other artists, grupero or not, are now increasingly afraid to play in Northern Mexico, fearing an attack themselves. While this certainly won't end all musical production or performance in Mexico, the clear war that drug dealers or others are now launching against Mexican culture is extremely distressing, and the inability of the police and authorities to even begin to figure out where to start doesn't bode well for Mexican musicians in the near future.