Mexican singer kidnapped, shot for refusing to sing

Culiacan (Mexico), April 9 (IANS/EFE) A singer with the nortena band Los Ciclones del Arroyo was kidnapped and shot in the leg after refusing to perform a song requested by a group of people at a party in Choix, a city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, police said.

Julio Cesar Leyva Beltran was abducted early Saturday, but he was later released and hospitalized in Los Mochis with a leg fracture caused by the gunshot.

The band was performing in the community of La Guayaba in Choix when several individuals asked that they play another song, police said.

The trio refused to perform the song and the unidentified individuals took the 41-year-old singer away in an SUV, police said.

The other musicians called police, filed a complaint and started searching for their bandmate.

Leyva Beltran, who was beaten, tortured and shot in the leg with a large-caliber weapon, was dropped off at a hospital in Choix a few hours later.

Los Ciclones del Arroyo's best known songs are "Asesino a sueldo" (Killer for Hire), "La marcha" (The March), "El federal de caminos" (The Federal Highway Patrolman), "El corrido de Pedro Paez" (The Ballad of Pedro Paez) and the "narcocorrido" "El aguila blanca" (The White Eagle).

A number of performers of narcocorridos, ballads that recount the exploits and travails of drug kingpins, have been murdered in northern Mexico in recent years.

Last November, a singer-songwriter who performed grupero music and narcocorridos was gunned down along with two other people in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa.

--IANS/EFE

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