Miguel Angel Jimenez was a member of the Union of Towns and Organizations, known as UPOEG for its initials in Spanish. His physique was found slumped inside the driver’s seat of the taxi he owned, a gunshot wound in his head.
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The leader of a civilian group that has spent the last 10 months searching for bodies of 43 missing students and others in the hills of Mexico’s Guerrero state was found shot to death in his taxi, authorities said.
Still he kept up his activism in Guerrero, a state plagued by drug trafficking and cultivation, gang battles, extortion, illegal logging and land disputes.
Jimenez, a vocal critic of Mexican politics, organized a search-party group last autumn.
At least 15 people were killed there over the weekend.
Jiménez led a group that searched for approximately 300 people who have disappeared in the state, helping uncover mass graves found around the city of Iguala where 43 Mexican students went missing in 2014. Faced by what they felt was authorities’ indifference and lack of action, they began digging in the dry, dusty hills looking for bodies and clues. “They fear the police themselves are involved in the disappearances”, said Cienfuegos, who is also in danger of retribution from the powerful cartels whose members routinely kill political leaders, police officers, military troops and even mayors, governors and prosecutors. Only one students’ remains have been identified.
A Mexican community activist who helped families search for their missing relatives has been killed.
The killings on Saturday and Sunday followed the recent upward trend in the murder rate in Guerrero, which has been governed by Rogelio Ortega since October 2014, the El Sur newspaper said.
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Search parties looked for the students back in November 2014, after they were abducted by police and handed over to drug traffickers who allegedly killed the students, burnt their bodies, and dumped the bodies in a river in the town of Cocula, near Iguala. According to the federal police, more than 20,000 people are missing across the whole country.
