MUSICAL MASSACRE

Killings of Mexican Entertainers Loudly Echo the Narco-Violence
Throughout the Country.

This year should have been a peak for Mexican singer Sergio Gomez.
His band K-Paz (pronounced cah-paz) de la Sierra released a monster
hit; this December they were nominated for a Grammy. But Gomez never
savored his triumph - he was found after a recent concert murdered in
classic narco-trafficker style, bound, burned, bludgeoned and
strangled. The killing, like those of a dozen other musicians since
June 2006, broadcasts more loudly than ever the impunity of Mexico's
drug cartels and the price all Mexicans pay for it.

No one understands the timing behind the spate of musician deaths;
perhaps it is grisly coincidence. Family members say Gomez didn't use
drugs or even smoke. But he did play roughly the same genre of music,
and died in the same month, as two other narco-victims: one kidnapped
and smothered with a plastic bag, the other - a rising star named
Zayda Pena - shot in the neck, saved by surgery, then shot again by
masked gunmen as she lay in her hospital bed.

Drug kingpins, it's known, swarm the music business. They often
sponsor young musicians who have no way to buy costly equipment.
Concert promotion, where 10,000 extra "ticket sales" can explain away
mammoth drug profits, is a prime way to launder money.

Many of the musicians killed, moreover, played variations of a genre
whose roots entwine with narco-culture. Falling under the category of
"ranchera," the sound essentially is Mexican country music, with folk
tunes punctuated by traditional German accordion and percussion. Some
of the genre's most popular practitioners are known for their
"narco-corridos," ballads glorifying the exploits of drug
traffickers. (Sergio Gomez, notably, didn't sing such songs). The
corridos are a modern incarnation of a musical tradition that
predates the Mexican revolution.

Ranchera singers share geographic roots with the traffickers, too.
According to Elijah Wald, author of a recent book on narco-corridos,
these musicians largely come from hardscrabble ranches and mountain
pueblos where the only people of wealth are drug traffickers.

"Essentially, they are the only rich Mexicans in Mexico who have an
interest in this music," Wald said. Even if drug lords aren't
sponsoring musicians, they may hire them for parties, or fall in love
with their female stars and compete with the male stars. In the drug
trade, where crazed violence is a resume requirement, such links can
turn deadly. Police speculated that Pena's death may have been such a case.

But aside from the spectacle of well-known performers dying
gruesomely, Mexicans have other reasons to be appalled. The 13
musician murders might appear to be a new trend, until you count them
along with the more than 2,500 other narco-style murders that
occurred in Mexico this year. Though federal authorities don't
release these figures, the newspaper El Universal reported that this
year's total more than doubled the 1,080 narco-killings recorded in 2001.

Ranchera singers might run special risks, but they can't be called
special targets. Sensational as the coverage has been, it really is
only a headline for a bloodier crisis: the impunity with which drug
cartels do their work.

From the start of his tenure last winter, President Felipe Calderon
has tried to bear down on them. He recently extradited a major
kingpin to the United States, and sent 10,000 soldiers and federal
police to half a dozen states where the traffickers dominate. Yet
this month's flamboyant murders make it clear who is winning.

"These musicians are wealthy, visible stars in a country that has had
a huge rise in violence - and people not put in jail for it," Wald
noted. "What distinguishes them from other victims is not that they
are musicians, but that we have heard of them."

Fame, though, could brighten the spotlight. When entertainers are
slain, Mexicans, like Americans, feel someone has robbed them of
someone they knew. Perhaps that will heighten the demand for the only
reform that will make a difference: at the core of Mexico's
chronically corrupt police forces, and in its often-compromised court
system and government.

Calderon did well to name narco-crime as his top priority. But to end
the massacre of his citizens, and the resultant bleeding of Mexico's
economy, he will have to fight much harder, and deeper, than any
president before him has dared.