With Mexican soldiers standing guard, a mother and two sons were carried to the grave in hand-hewn pine coffins on Thursday at the first funeral for the victims of a drug cartel ambush that left nine Mexican American women and children dead.

Clad in shirtsleeves, suits or modest dresses, about 500 mourners embraced in grief under white tents erected in La Mora, a hamlet of about 300 people who consider themselves Mormon but are not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some wept, and some sang hymns.

Members of the extended community, many of whom, like the victims, are dual US-Mexican citizens, had built the coffins themselves, and used shovels to dig a single, large grave for the three in the rocky soil of La Mora’s small cemetery. Farmers and teenage boys carried the coffins.

The coffins were placed on low tables, and mourners filed past to view the bodies and pay their last respects to Dawna Ray Langford, 43, and her sons Trevor, 11, and Rogan, two.

They were to be laid to rest together, just as they died together on Monday when attackers fired a hail of bullets at their SUV on a dirt road leading to another settlement, Colonia LeBarón, in neighboring Chihuahua state. Six children and three women in all were killed in the attack on the convoy of three SUVs.

There was no talk of revenge in this highly religious community, only a deep thirst for justice.

“The eyes of the world are upon what happened here, and there are saints all over this world whose hearts have been touched,” Jay Ray, Dawna’s father, said in a eulogy.

“The plan of God is for his saints to gather out from among the wicked, become separate from them, to band together to establish together the laws of respect and onedom,” Jay Ray said. “God will take care of the wicked.”

Dawna’s younger sister Amber Ray, 34, eulogized her as a devoted mother to her 13 children and homemaker who loved a good laugh and baked the best birthday cakes around.

The hamlet is about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of the Arizona border, where American-style frame houses alternate with barns and orchards.

Patrols of Mexican army troops passed by regularly on the hamlet’s only paved road, providing security that was lacking the day of the killings.

The other victims are expected to be buried in Colonia LeBarón later. But the two communities, whose residents are related, drew together in a show of grief.

Soldiers at a checkpoint outside the small Mormon community of La Mora. Photograph: José Luis González/Reuters

Dozens of high-riding pickups and SUVS, many with US license plates from as far away as North Dakota, arrived in La Mora for the funeral, traveling over the dirt road where the attack occurred.

Officials say gunmen from the Juárez drug cartel had set up the ambush as part of a turf war with the Sinaloa cartel, and the US families drove into it.

Steven Langford, who was mayor of La Mora from 2015 to 2018 and whose sister Christina Langford was one of the women killed, said he expects the slayings to lead to an exodus from the community.

Quick Guide Mexico's evolving war on drugs Show Calderón sends in the army Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán. Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed. Kingpin strategy Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders. That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie. Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups. But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain. "Hugs not bullets" The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.

“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine. Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants. Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.

“Now this place is going to become a ghost town,” he said. “A lot of people are going to leave.”

Mexican officials said the attackers may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of a rival gang. “They let the children go, so we can deduce that it was not a targeted attack” on the families, said the army’s chief of staff, Gen Homero Mendoza.

But Julian LeBarón, whose brother Benjamin, an anti-crime activist, was killed by cartel gunmen in 2009, disputed that.

“They had to have known that it was women and children,” he said, adding that the eight children who survived reported that one mother got out of her SUV and raised her hands and was gunned down anyway.

To many, the bloodshed seemed to demonstrate once more that the government has lost control over vast areas of Mexico to drug traffickers.

And it called into question President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” security strategy of trying to solve underlying social problems instead of battling drug cartels with military force.

It was also the latest shocking act of cartel violence to suggest that the old rules against killing foreigners, women or children are collapsing.

“The country is suffering very much from violence,” said William Stubbs, a pecan and alfalfa farmer who serves on a community security committee in Colonia LeBarón. “You see it all over. And it ain’t getting better. It’s getting worse.”﻿