MEXICAN POP SINGER GUNNED DOWN

Valentin Elizalde and Two Others Are Killed Leaving a Concert. It's
Another Apparent Gangland Ambush As Drug Cartels Claim More Victims.

MEXICO CITY -- A popular singer, his manager and his driver were
gunned down Saturday in an ambush after a concert in the border city
of Reynosa in an apparent gangland hit, as unabated drug-related
violence continued across Mexico.

The singer, 27-year-old Valentin Elizalde, was killed about 20
minutes after he performed at a fair. Elizalde was a mainstay of the
accordion-based norteno music variously known as banda or grupero,
and was also known as "the Golden Rooster."

According to media reports, two vehicles chased Elizalde's black
Suburban as he left the concert and opened fire with automatic
weapons before dozens of witnesses. As many as 70 spent cartridges
were found on the street around Elizalde's SUV. According to media
reports, Elizalde was hit as many as eight times.

The singer often toured in the United States and recorded several
albums for Universal Music. Among his biggest hits were "Vete Ya,"
"Ebrio de Amor" and "Soy Asi."

He also penned lyrics honoring one of Mexico's most notorious drug
lords, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Last
year, he sang one of his narcocorridos, ballads honoring the exploits
of drug dealers, to a crowd of more than 3,000 convicts at the Puente
Grande prison in the central state of Jalisco.

Guzman escaped from a neighboring prison in 2001 and remains at large.

More than 2,000 people have been killed in the continuing war among
competing cartels and the police over Mexico's lucrative trade in
illicit drugs, according to media reports.

On Saturday, the toll included a federal prosecutor gunned down in
the northern city of Monterrey, and a police chief and city
councilman in the Monterrey suburb of Santa Catarina.

Baltazar Gomez Trejo of Santa Catarina was the sixth police chief
killed in the northern state of Nuevo Leon this year.

He had been in office for 23 days and had purged the city's
drug-enforcement unit, according to the newspaper El Universal.

In a ceremony this month at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Hollywood,
Elizalde received the "soloist of the year" prize at Los Premios de
la Radio awards for regional Mexican music. He was depicted in a
mural in Pico Rivera, a Southern California center for norteno music,
in December.

The son of a musician, Elizalde was born in the northern state of
Sonora. Once a law student, he began recording in the late 1990s.

According to the Guadalajara newspaper Mural, the convicts at Puente
Grande joined in with Elizalde on "Clave Privada" (Secret Code), a
song celebrating Guzman's exploits, when Elizalde performed a Mexican
Independence Day concert there in 2005.

Guzman's Sinaloa cartel is battling the Gulf cartel and other
criminal groups for control of key smuggling points across the
U.S.-Mexico border.

In a 2005 Spanish-language interview with the Associated Press,
Elizalde defended narcocorrido songs.

"In no way do I think they should be banned, because they are part of
popular expression, what the people sing and what they want," he
said. "All we do is sing them, like minstrels."