A Mexican court sentenced a reputed Barrio Azteca gang member to 430 years in prison in the deaths of 11 women forced into prostitution at a Juárez hotel, officials said.

Pedro Payan Gloria, alias "El Pifas," was sentenced Monday in the homicides of women whose remains were found in the Navajo Arroyo in the Valley of Juárez in 2012, the Chihuahua attorney general's office said.

Payan was convicted on homicide and sexual exploitation charges. The Chihuahua attorney general's office pointed out that 430 years was a historically long sentence.

Payan was convicted of murders that occurred between 2009 and 2012 as part of a sex trafficking scheme run by Azteca gang members at the Hotel Verde in downtown Juárez, prosecutors said.

In 2012, the bodies were found during desert searches in the Navajo Arroyo, located across the border from the Fort Hancock area, according to El Paso Times archives.

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State prosecutors had said that the women — some as young as 15 years old — were held in captivity and forced to sell drugs and work as prostitutes, according to newspaper archives.

Victims were recruited with promises of job offers at downtown businesses but were then abducted, drugged, held captive and forced into prostitution, prosecutors said.

The gang ran an extortion scheme forcing downtown business owners to pay a protection "quota" to the gang, the attorney general's office said in a news release.

The gang would "forgive" businesses from paying extortion payments if they helped recruit women for the prostitution scheme, the attorney general's office said.

Various members of the sex trafficking ring were tasked with transporting women to houses and hotel rooms to meet clients, according to news archives.

Other ring members kept watch on the women and made sure they did not stray more than a block from the hotel. If victims came up short on money or were not useful, they were killed.

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"Once the women were no longer 'useful' in their illicit activities, they decided to take their lives and abandoned their bodies in the vicinity of the Navajo Arroyo in the Valley of Juárez," the state prosecutor's office said in a statement in 2013.

Three other people have been convicted and sentenced in the case, officials said.

The Navajo Arroyo case was one of the more recent "femicides" cases in Juárez, where hundreds of women have disappeared and been killed since the early 1990s.

Daniel Borunda may be reached at 546-6102; dborunda@elpasotimes.com; @BorundaDaniel on Twitter.

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