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Mexico has announced 430-year prison sentence in a femicide case where a man was convicted of killing 11 young women near Juarez, the largest city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, also known for crimes against women.
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The convict, Pedro Payan Gloria, also known as "El Pifas" was convicted of murdering 11 women whose remains were found in the waters of El Navajo stream. Some of the skeletal remains were found as early as in 2012 in the agricultural fields of the Juarez Valley, east of the city, AP reported.
Gloria is known to have drugged women as young as 15 years of age and use them for sex trafficking and selling drugs, and when they failed to comply or were no longer needed, he would kill them, the prosecutors' office said on Monday.
According to the state prosecutor's office, in 2013, the man baited women by offering employment opportunities in a modeling agency and a grocery store.
“These businesses were used by the gang as a ‘hook’ to offer young women jobs. Once they obtained the information they needed from the women’s job applications, they used different techniques and other people to kidnap them or pressure them into forced prostitution, and the consumption and or sale of drugs,” the state attorney general’s office said in a statement.
The prosecutor's office said, between 2009 and 2010, Gloria abducted and held the women in forced servitude at Hotel Verde in Ciudad Juárez.
Activists and victims' family members say they have been pressuring the investigators to find the suspects. Two other people have also been convicted in the case.
The court ordered Gloria to compensate the families of 11 victims with US$25,600 apart from the minimum sentence of 30 years for each murder, adding an additional 99 years for trafficking charges and another year on the charges of organized crime against him.
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