Pulitzer Center: The Life and Death of Mexican Political Activist Miguel Jimenez Kara Andrade - Pulitzer Center
go to original August 22, 2015

The last time community leader and political activist Miguel Ángel Jiménez Blanco was seen on WhatsApp was at 1:31 pm on Saturday, August 8.

The silence was uncommon from the dogged, always-connected activist who only slept two hours a night. Jiménez, 45, was an early leader in the search for disappeared students and clandestine mass graves in Guerrero, Mexico. Members of Fuente Informativa, the WhatsApp group he set up in 2014 for activists and journalists to share reports and tips about protests, rights abuses and violence, wondered where he could be.

Jiménez was also the community organizer for a vigilante or community self-defense group called the Union of Peoples and Organizations of Guerrero State, known as UPOEG in Spanish. The group armed dozens of towns in the southern Mexican state. After 43 students disappeared in September 2014, Jiménez led searches in the city of Iguala to find them, using the Internet and his mobile phone to gather tips before organizing physical search parties.

Around midnight on the day Jiménez went missing, a member of Fuente Informativa reposted a story from the local press that said the activist's bullet-ridden body had been found along the road to Acapulco, at the entrance to his hometown, Xaltianguis.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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