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Latin Grammy winner Ramon Ayala was rounded up during a raid on a drug cartel’s Christmas party in a wealthy gated community, a lavish night that showed the audacity of traffickers in gathering despite being hounded by police.

Mexican norteno bands often sing about drug trafficking and violence and many have been rumored to perform at drug traffickers’ weddings and other parties, but few have been caught.

A spokesman for the federal Attorney General’s Office said Monday the Texas-based Ayala was released after being questioned Saturday following a military operation that is part of the government’s campaign to crack down on drug gangs. Authorities found no grounds for charging him with a crime, the spokesman said.

Three gunmen were killed and 11 others suspected of working for the Beltran Leyva drug cartel were detained, and $280,000 in cash and 16 automatic rifles were seized, the navy said.

Ayala and his norteno band, Los Bravos del Norte, were performing in a gated community of mansions outside the mountain town of Tepoztlan when sailors raided the house and a shootout ensued before dawn Friday, said the official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name.

“It’s always been quiet,” she said. “This scares me.”

Stray bullets shattered the windows of a nearby home where Maura Cristina Lopez works as a maid. She said she was shocked at the violence in the bucolic neighborhood, where troops in trucks patroled Monday.

Ayala, a Mexican accordionist and norteno singer who lives in Hidalgo, Texas, has a large following along the Mexico-U.S. border and has won two Latin Grammys.

Tepotzlan, just south of Mexico City, is popular with foreign and Mexican tourists because of its cobblestone streets and the ruins of a pre-Columbian pyramid built atop a mountain.

City officials did not immediately respond to an e-mail asking if Ayala would still attend.

Each year, he hosts a Christmas festival in Hidalgo, a free event that includes music, food and the opportunity for impoverished children to line up at Ayala’s home to receive a ticket for a free gift. The Hidalgo city Web site said Ayala was scheduled to host the event Wednesday.

In one of his album covers, he stands on a map of the U.S.-Mexico border holding a guitar and an accordion in the Mexican flag’s colors of red, white and green while an American flaps in the air near a military helicopter.

“Ramon Ayala has defined norteno music with signature songs and definitive instrumental styling that have made him a superstar on both sides of the El Rio Grande,” his Web site says.

The singer’s representatives at Serca Music in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey declined to comment Monday.

A woman who answered the door at Ayala’s home in Hidalgo said the performer was not there and she was unsure when he would return. Outside, larger-than-life photos of Ayala and his band plastered the side of a tractor trailer next to an extravagant nativity scene. The band’s tour bus stood on a side street.

Over the years, several norteno musicians have been slain, including performers of the popular northern “Narcocorrido” songs that glorify drug trafficking.

Ayala, who favors black cowboy hats, sings romantic ballads of heartbreak and rural life in Mexico.

A year earlier, banda singer Valentin Elizalde was shot to death along with his manager and driver shortly after performing in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas. Police said his slaying was possibly linked to a grisly video posted online set to one of Elizalde’s songs, “A Mis Enemigos” (”To My Enemies”).

Among the best known performers killed was Sergio Gomez, a singer with K-Paz de la Sierra, who went missing after a 2007 concert in the Michoacan state capital of Morelia. His tortured body was found the next day along a highway.

Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City and Christopher Sherman in Hidalgo, Texas, contributed to this story.