What happened?

A gray video from a security camera shows how a young man runs into the Tec de Monterrey
facilities. His friend had been shot and was calling for help. It won't appear again. In one of the
most important private universities in Mexico, one of the worst and most cruel crimes of the war
against drug trafficking had just been committed. On the Monterrey campus (northeast of the
country), two students were murdered on March 19, 2010. And the one who pulled the trigger
was not a drug lord, but the Mexican Army. "The dead do not declare."

Jorge and Javier were extrajudicially executed. Javier had been wounded by some stray bullets
from that confrontation. But Jorge was still alive. The military realized their big mistake. Those
young people did not look like murderers. They had backpacks, they went out to eat. But, as a
soldier who intervenes in the documentary points out: "The dead do not declare." Those were
the orders of that Army trained to exterminate members of organized crime in the streets. And
both of them ended up dead with a bullet received a meter away. A coup de grace. They beat
them and built a crime scene to suit themselves: each one held a rifle.

One student remembers seeing a man from the university maintenance staff cleaning up the
blood the next morning. A few hours later, the center continued with its usual activity. The
families of those two young people tirelessly searched for their children in every corner of the
city. The dead were not them. The dead were two hitmen. The Tec insisted—although he knew
the truth from that same night—that what happened had nothing to do with them.

There is good news, two days ago five soldiers involved were sentenced to 90 years in prison for
the murder of Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, students
at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, which occurred more than 13 years ago.

Judge José Reynoso Castillo, of the fourth district court of Nuevo León, handed down what is the
first sentence in the case, where the soldiers were found guilty of the crime of qualified
homicide with the aggravating circumstance of advantage.

Although the judge gave a sentence of 90 years to those involved, the system only allows serving
60 years. This situation is added to the fact that convictions for other crimes such as identity
theft, abuse of authority and excessive force are still pending.

Of those sentenced, three are currently in a military prison, two in a prison in Nuevo León. A
sixth person involved who is being prosecuted is missing.