The court sentenced the infantrymen to 26 years and three months imprisonment, while acquitting one other soldier who had been charged.
The men are part of a group of 16 soldiers arrested in March 2011 on accusations that they had tipped off the Zetas about military operations in exchange for payment.
The eight convicted soldiers were discharged from the military and fined 15,000 pesos (US$ 798). They were given five days to lodge an appeal.
The soldier’s defense, which was backed by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, had argued that the men’s confessions had been extracted through torture and were inadmissible. Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense in 2014 granted compensation to three of the accused for acts of torture.
Seven other soldiers arrested in 2011 are still awaiting trial.
The Zetas cartel was formed in 1997 by a handful of defectors from the army's special forces. The group has since become one of Mexico’s largest and most violent drug syndicates, with strongholds in half of the country, and has carried out massacres of hundreds of civilians.
