Mexico City, July 29 (teleSUR-RHC)-- Five men have been given a 697-year prison sentence for cases of femicide in Mexico on Tuesday -- an unprecedented move in a country where the systematic killing of women often goes unpunished.

A prosecutor in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua sentenced five people to nearly 700 years for killing a total of eleven young women, news agency Reuters reported.

"They deceived girls to recruit them for prostitution and use them as drug distributors. When they weren't 'useful' anymore, they took their lives and dumped their bodies in the Navajo stream of the Juarez Valley," prosecutors said in a statement.

The move is unprecedented in Mexico where, according to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, six women are murdered every day, but only 1.6 percent of cases investigated as femicides lead to sentencing.

“For the Mexican state, drug trafficking is the most important threat to the country, which obscures other serious crimes as the murder of women and girls who die from gender-based discrimination and hate, most of which remain unpunished,” according to a report on femicide from the Observatory.

In March, the Supreme Court of Mexico ordered for the first time to investigate a case as "femicide" in 2010, after it was previously ruled a suicide. In addition to Tuesday's prison sentence, the convicted must also pay $550,000 compensation for damages to the families of the victims who were found dead in 2012.