Why Did They Massacre The Mormons In Mexico?
It's more accurate to call it an act of terror than an accident
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UPDATE on Oct. 31, 2025 - Next Tuesday will mark six years since the massacre of Mormons in Sonora. The incident first sparked President Donald Trump to promise to designate cartels as terrorists. He backed down then but went onto designate them this year, and the U.S. military is now blowing up alleged drug boats with missiles. Surprisingly though, the Juarez Cartel, which was behind the Mormon massacre, is not on the list of designated groups. I think this account here gets the closest to explain what motivated the attack that led to this chain of events.
On November 3, 2019, two convoys of gunmen from La Linea, a paramilitary wing of the Juarez Cartel, drove out of a ranch in the northwest of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The larger group of up to sixty sicarios went north towards the U.S. border, crossing into the state of Sonora and heading to the strategic smuggling city of Agua Prieta. A second group of more than thirty went west through the ramshackle village of Pancho Villa and onto an old mountain road towards the town of Bavispe.
They were armed to the teeth with AR-15s and Kalashnikovs as well as frag grenades and a Minimi machine gun. The aim of the double-pronged attack was to seize the plaza, or territory, in a corner of Sonora from the Sinaloa Cartel.
The offensive was planned a month earlier at a meeting in the Chihuahua town of Buenaventura. The council of war did not only include high-ranking operatives of La Linea. There was also a trafficker nicknamed Tolteca, or Freddy Calles Romero, who had worked with the Sinaloa Cartel but fallen out with bosses and flipped sides. And there was an envoy of the infamous Sinaloan kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, who was in a beef with fellow Sinaloan mobsters.
The attack failed in its aim of seizing the territory. But the gunmen committed the horrific atrocity of massacring nine women and children from a cross-border Mormon community.
The sicarios murdered the Mormons on the morning of Nov. 4 as they traveled along a mountain dirt road in three separate vehicles. The killing was especially brutal: they shot up a child so badly a rescuer could not tell if it was one or two bodies; they torched a car with a mother and her four infants; they shot one woman while she tried to surrender. Other children survived bullets in the back, jaw, leg, wrist, and chest.
Massacres are depressingly common in modern Mexico. But the sad truth is that as the victims were U.S. citizens it made global headlines and was politically explosive. Then-president Donald Trump initially promised to designate cartels as terrorists and floated the idea of unleashing U.S. military force. The massacre came days after an uprising by the Sinaloa Cartel in Culiacán and exposed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador as weak on security. It was perhaps the most vulnerable period of his rule.
The tragedy is explored in detail in a new documentary series “Massacre of the Mormons” (Masacre de los Mormones) made by Pacha Films, of journalists Guillermo Galdos and Luis Del Valle, and released as a Max Original. I worked on it as a producer and appear on screen.
I would recommend watching what is by far the most detailed account of the incident with shocking new testimony and evidence. We spent a lot of time in the Mormon communities, especially in La Mora, Sonora, and the families were incredibly open and generous with us. Above all, the children who had suffered severe trauma bravely sat before the camera and put their truth on the record.
Still, it was tough to make a series on such a hot case. While we were working on it, a lawyer for family members and a police officer who had gone after the killers were both assassinated.
The Mexican federal investigation into the massacre was initially confused and sluggish. But over time, the prosecutors built a more solid case and have put 36 people allegedly connected to the attack in jail. This shows a better prosecution of the atrocity than most in Mexico. However, few have actually been sentenced and the convictions are for organized crime rather than the massacre itself.
A parallel civil case also took place in the United States in which family members, incredibly, sued the Juarez Cartel. A federal judge in North Dakota ruled that the cartel pay four billion dollars in compensation.
The court filings on both sides of the border provide strong evidence that La Linea were the culprits. But prosecutors have not given the public a clear account of the motivation for the murders. And other theories persist about who was really behind the killings and why, from the idea of a U.S. plot to grab Mexico’s lithium to water wars in the drought-ridden region.
In the story here, I underline the most important facts that investigators have dug up and lay out my thinking on the central question of why cartel gunmen killed nine women and children. How we describe this violence gets into a raging political battle about how Washington should react to cartels. But putting the politics aside, I believe it is more accurate to describe the massacre as an act of terror than an accident.
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