MEXICO CITY�Police pulled 12 bodies from a well in northern Mexico, believed to be those of a group of musicians abducted last week by presumed members of a drug gang�the latest mass killing in Mexico's drug war and the first since President Enrique Pe�a Nieto took office in December.
The death toll was expected to rise. Some 18 members of a band called Kombo Kolombia were abducted by gunmen early Friday after a gig Thursday night at a private bar about 50 miles north of the state capital of Monterrey and 100 miles south of the Texas border.
Nuevo Le�n Gov. Rodrigo Medina said Monday there were "indications" the bodies belonged to the band, which plays a popular style of Colombian folk music called Vallenato.
The bodies found in the well were clad in T-shirts adorned with the band's logo that the musicians wear at concerts, a state security official said.
Shortly after midnight, about 10 armed men burst into the bar and abducted the performers and their crew at gunpoint, according to a member of the band who escaped, the security official said. After driving for about four hours, the armed men took the musicians to an abandoned ranch, where they beat them, forced them to their knees, and started asking questions about drugs, the security official said. The gunmen then executed at least two of them, he added.
One of the musicians managed to escape, and after walking all night, found help. He led authorities to the abandoned ranch where the bodies were found in a well.
"We don't know if the rest escaped or if they were killed. We continue to search for them," the state official said. He said two band members were Colombian, and the rest Mexican.
In the past, musicians who play so-called Norte�o music of narco-corridos, or songs praising the exploits of Mexico's drug lords have been targeted by rival drug traffickers. But this doesn't appear to be the case with Kombo Kolombia, which largely played romantic songs.
The massacre comes as Mexico's new president tries to shift attention from the violence that has scarred the country's image abroad to a positive vision of a dynamic, emerging economy. Mr. Pe�a Nieto is getting ready to introduce changes that will increase competition in the telecommunications sector and open the energy sector to foreign investment.
He also wants to shift the emphasis in Mexico's security policy from capturing or killing top drug traffickers to tamping down the violence that marked the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calder�n. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Pe�a Nieto said he would concentrate police efforts on reducing high-impact crimes of violence such as murder, kidnapping and the extortion that now affects many small and midsize businesses.
During Mr. Calder�n's six-year term, at least 60,000 people were killed, most of them victims of warring drug cartels, after the president sent the Mexican military and newly expanded federal police to try to recover large areas of Mexico where powerful drug lords hold sway.
Some analysts and human-rights activists have questioned whether Mr. Calder�n's strategy of capturing or killing drug lords was responsible for increasing violence, as a handful of large criminal organizations were fragmented into many small gangs that fought each other for territorial control. As the conflict grew, cartels tried to outdo each other in sometimes cruelly theatrical acts of violence in order to terrorize the government, rivals, and the civilian population.
Since 2010, Nuevo Le�n and the neighboring states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas have been a battleground for two of Mexico's most powerful criminal organizations, the Gulf Cartel, and their former enforcers, the Zetas, who are notorious for their brutality. Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Le�n, was once considered one of Latin America's safest cities, but for the last three years has been the scene of killings in which drug traffickers have often left decapitated bodies in public places, or hung victims' bodies from bridges in the city in the middle of the day.
In 2011, at the height of the violence, there were 1,701 drug-related homicides in Nuevo Le�n, the security official said. That number fell to 1,045 last year.
Mexico's violence has shifted geographically, but hasn't appeared to abate since Mr. Pe�a Nieto took over. The government recently called out the army to patrol areas of the president's home state, the state of Mexico, where there have been more than 80 drug-related killings in the last month, according to local media accounts.
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