Sergio Vega – latest in Mexican wave of death

Mexican singer Sergio Vega - aka El Shaka - who was shot dead at the weekend just hours after denying reports that he had been murdered, is the latest in a long line of Mexican grupero - or country - singers to be killed in recent years.
 
The assassination of Vega is the most high-profile since that of Sergio Gomez in 2007. Both men were known for singing narco-corridos - or narco-ballads - which glamourise the exploits of drug smugglers. But such songs also infuriate the rivals of those they champion and can lead to retribution from other gangs.
 
Vega was killed on Saturday as he drove to a village festival concert in the state of Sinaloa. A group of gunmen in a truck pulled alongside his red Cadillac and opened fire. According to El Debate newspaper, when the singer's car careered off the road the killers approached the wreckage and "finished the job" with shots to his head and chest.
 
The irony is that just hours before he was killed Vega had come out to deny reports that he had been murdered. He told the entertainment website La Oreja: "It's happened to me for years now, someone tells a radio station or a newspaper I've been killed, or suffered an accident. And then I have to call my dear mum, who has heart trouble, to reassure her."
 
Vega's death comes two-and-a-half years after that of Gomez, frontman of the band K-Paz de la Sierra. His strangled corpse was found by the roadside in his home state of Michoacan a day after he was kidnapped. His genitals had been burnt with a cigarette lighter. That killing led Vega to increase his security.
 
Others to have died include singer Carlos Ocaranza, who was gunned down last August as he left a bar in Guadalajara where he had given a concert. Zayda Pena, the female lead singer with Zayda and the Guilty Ones, was shot in hospital in 2007 after a first assassination attempt failed. A week before Gomez was killed, the body of trumpeter Jose Luis Aquino was found on the roadside, a nylon bag over his head.
 
Elijah Wald, a guitarist who has written a book on narco-corridos, says the songs glamourising the drug smugglers are becoming more popular – and more lucrative for performers. "The first thing a drug runner would do after a successful run was to hire someone to write a corrido about it," he said.
 
Although Vega's supporters claim that he did not have gang connections, the singer admitted that his work addressed "dark themes". One of his songs contained the lyrics: "Shaka told his people / I want to have some coca paste processed / Because that's what the customer wants / At the end if it rains and I get wet / You will get wet as well."
 
As in American gangsta rap - which has several parallels with narco-corridos - 'getting wet' is a reference to being shot. And many have compared the deaths of the Grupero singers in Mexico to the killings of American rappers like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, who had underworld connections, in the early 1990s.
 
The increasing popularity of narco-corridos coincides with the rise in the drugs traffic through Mexico. Since the Colombian empire of Pablo Escobar was toppled and the government reclaimed control of its borders much of the cocaine trade has switched to Mexico and the annual body count is in the thousands.

Even as Vega was mourned, unknown assassins gunned down their highest profile victim yet: the leading candidate for Governor in forthcoming elections in the border state of Tamaulipa. Rodolfo Torre Cantu, who had put fighting organised crime and corruption at the heart of his campaign, was shot dead with four others in his vehicle near the state capital Ciudad Victoria.

Killing singers is one thing, but the assassination of a leading politician takes the violence to a whole new level and recalls 1994, when presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was killed, leading to a collapse in the value of Mexico's currency, the peso. ·