Mexico convicts 11 cartel members for killing 122 bus passengers near US border in 2 years

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican prosecutors on Wednesday finally secured convictions — and 50-year prison sentences — against 11 drug cartel gunmen for a 2010-2011 massacre in which 122 passengers were killed. Passengers were pulled from passing buses and forced to fight each other to the death with sledgehammers.

The sentences handed down Wednesday were in one of the most horrific chapters of Mexico’s drug war, so horrific they were hard to believe until dozens of bodies were found in unmarked graves with their skulls crushed.

Federal prosecutors said the 11 suspects were arrested between 2015 and 2017 and have been in prison since then, but their trials have lasted seven to nine years, which is not unusual in Mexico.

Prosecutors in the state of Tamaulipas reported at the time that members of the now-splintered Zetas cartel pulled male passengers off buses headed to the border city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, or Matamoros, further east.

Officials said at the time that the Zetas suspected that the rival Gulf Cartel was sending reinforcements in buses to border towns they controlled. The Zetas pulled young men off the buses, interrogated them and offered some the chance to live and join the gang — if they proved their worth by fighting other innocent passengers with sledgehammers.

It seemed an unbelievable level of brutality until forensic experts began excavating scattered mass graves containing hundreds of bodies, almost all young men, many with their skulls crushed in. Several hammers were also found in the graves.

That tragedy first came to light in 2011, when authorities found 48 secret graves containing the bodies of 193 people in the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Most had their skulls crushed with sledgehammers, and many were Central American migrants.

It was later revealed that the victims had been pulled from passing buses by the old drug cartel Zetas and forced to fight each other with hammers, or else they would be killed if they refused to work for the cartel.

The drug cartels’ control in Tamaulipas was so great at the time that bus companies, threatened by gangs, did not report the disappearances. It was not until the victims’ unclaimed luggage began to pile up at the bus stations at the border.

The kidnappings and killings took place in and around the city of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, where the Zetas also slaughtered 72 migrants, many of them from Central America, around the same time. The lone survivor later told authorities that cartel gunmen had killed the migrants after they refused to join the gang.