MEXICO CITY – Singer Carlos Ocaranza was gunned down Sunday as he left a bar where he had given a concert in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara and his agent was seriously wounded, police said.

Ocaranza, who was related to a famous singer murdered nearly three years ago, had just finished performing at the La Revancha bar in the city’s western section, Jalisco state police chief Alberto Gutierrez Miranda said.

“It was a direct attack. They were going to get into the musician’s SUV, but the musician ended up dead on the sidewalk, with a shot to the head and another in the chest, while his agent was shot three times, one of them (the shots) in the head,” the police chief said.

Two gunmen were waiting for the 32-year-old Ocaranza in the street outside the bar and fled on a motorcycle after shooting him.

Investigators found 12 bullet casings from 9 mm weapons at the crime scene.

Ocaranza’s agent, Jorge Altamirano Pelayo, was taken to a Guadalajara hospital, where he is listed in critical condition.

Ocaranza was related to Valentin Elizalde, who was murdered in November 2006 in the border city of Reynosa by drug traffickers apparently unhappy with some of his compositions, the Jalisco state Attorney General’s Office said, without providing details on what the family ties were.

Elizalde and other singers perform what is known in Mexico as grupero music, a genre that includes so-called “narcocorridos,” ballads that recount the exploits and travails of drug kingpins.

Reports claim that drug capos pay large sums for the ballads and more than a dozen grupero singers have been murdered since 1992.

In January 2008, Roberto Ignacio del Fierro Lugo, the publicist for Jesus Elizalde, Valentin’s brother, was murdered near a recording studio in the Guadalajara suburb of Zapopan.

Before managing Jesus Elizalde’s public relations, Del Fiero had represented Valentin.

Valentin’s brothers, including Jesus, have stopped playing narcocorridos.

In December 2007, a wave of violence was unleashed against various grupero singers, such as Sergio Gomez, 34, the lead singer of Grammy-nominated band K-PAZ de la Sierra, who was kidnapped and murdered after a concert, and 28-year-old vocalist Zayda Peña Arjona, 28, killed by a gunman who pursued her to the hospital where she was recovering from gunshot wounds suffered earlier.

Armed groups linked to Mexico’s drug cartels murdered around 1,500 people in 2006 and 2,700 people in 2007, with the 2008 death toll soaring to more than 6,000.

So far this year, according to press tallies, more than 4,000 people have died.

Mexican prosecutors said earlier that nine people, including a family of tourists from the United States, were murdered in separate incidents in Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

The wave of killings started Friday afternoon, when three people were gunned down in a neighborhood near the airport and a fourth person was shot to death in the western section of the border city, the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s Office said.

Three U.S. citizens from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who were visiting relatives in the Juarez metropolitan area died when gunmen opened fire on their vehicle.

The gunmen staged the attack at kilometer 22.5 of the Juarez-El Porvenir highway, near the town of Loma Blanca, leaving three adults dead and two children wounded.

The unidentified victims were two women between the ages of 25 and 35, and a 40-year-old man.

Two men, meanwhile, were gunned down early Saturday in separate incidents in downtown Juarez.

The body of a man killed execution-style was found in the street that runs in front of the Plaza del Mariachi.

Another man was gunned down a few minutes later and 50 meters (55 yards) away while police worked the first crime scene.

The wave of violence in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 1,000 people have been murdered this year, continues to claim lives despite the deployment of 8,000 federal police and soldiers.

In 2008, Juarez earned the dubious distinction of being Mexico’s most violent city, living through days when dozens of people were murdered in the span of a few hours, and armed groups committed acts of violence in public areas that terrorized residents.

The border city, home to the Juarez drug cartel, ended 2008 with a total of 1,605 people murdered, according to press tallies, including 77 federal, state and municipal police officers.