Mexico convicts 11 cartel gunmen in killings of 122 bus passengers near US border over 2 years

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican prosecutors finally won convictions — and 50-year prison sentences — Wednesday against 11 drug cartel gunmen for the 2010-2011 massacre of 122 passengers who were pulled off passing buses and forced to fight each other to the death with sledgehammers.

The sentences announced Wednesday involved one of the most gruesome chapters of Mexico’s drug war, so horrific it was hard to believe until scores of bodies were found in unmarked graves with their skulls bashed in.

Federal prosecutors said the 11 suspects were arrested between 2015 and 2017, and have been held in prison since that time. However, their trials have lasted between seven and nine years, which is not tremendously unusual in Mexico.

Prosecutors in Tamaulipas state said at the time that members of the now-splintered Zetas cartel began pulling 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 the rival Gulf cartel was sending reinforcements on buses to the border cities they controlled. The Zetas pulled young men off the buses, questioned 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 cruelty, until forensic experts began excavating scattered mass graves holding hundreds of bodies, almost all young males, many with their skulls bashed in. Some hammers were also found in the graves.

That tragedy first came to light in 2011, when authorities found 48 clandestine 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 the victims had been pulled off passing buses by the old Zetas drug cartel, and forced to fight each other with hammers or be killed, if they refused to work for the cartel.

So total was the control of drug cartels in Tamaulipas at the time that the bus companies — which were under threat by gangs — failed to report the disappearances, until the victims' unclaimed luggage began piling up at border city bus terminals.

The abductions and killings were carried out in and around the town of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, where the Zetas also slaughtered 72 migrants, many from Central America, around the same time. The lone survivor later told authorities that cartel gunmen killed the migrants after they refused to join the gang.