CAMARGO, MEXICO – A court in Mexico has dealt hefty 50-year prison terms to 11 former police officers for their involvement in the 2021 murders of 17 migrants and two Mexican nationals, per an official announcement on Tuesday.
These ex-officers were part of a select police group in Tamaulipas, a northern state adjacent to Texas. Earlier this year, they were found guilty of homicide and misuse of their authority. An additional officer, charged only with authority abuse, was sentenced to 19 years in prison, according to Assistant Public Safety Secretary Luis RodrÃguez Bucio.
Originally, the defendants claimed they were responding to gunfire and thought they were chasing vehicles associated with a drug cartel involved in migrant smuggling. However, their attempt to burn the victims’ bodies and cover up the crime raised alarm bells.
The victims’ charred bodies were discovered in a pickup truck in Camargo, a town across the Rio Grande from Texas, an area long plagued by violent confrontations between the remnants of the Gulf cartel and the old Zetas cartel.
Most of the slain migrants were from rural, Indigenous farming communities in Guatemala. Family members reported losing touch with 13 of the migrants as they made their way towards the United States.
The truck carrying the bodies showed 113 bullet impacts, but the near absence of spent shell casings at the scene puzzled investigators. It was later revealed that the officers involved had removed the casings, likely to avoid detection.
The officers were part of the Special Operations Group, known as GOPES in Spanish, a state police unit previously implicated in other human rights abuses under a different alias. This unit has since been disbanded.