Ayotzinapa missing students activist killed in Mexico

At least 15 people were killed over the weekend in the troubled southwestern state of Guerrero, including an activist who helped lead efforts to find the 43 students who disappeared and were presumed murdered last year, according to Mexican officials.

Ten of the murders took place in the resort city of Acapulco, which is packed with tourists visiting for their summer vacations, local police said.

One of the victims, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, was a leader of a community police organization known as Upoeg (Unión de Pueblos y Organizaciones del Estado de Guerrero). Jiménez was found shot to death on Saturday inside the taxi he drove in the rural outskirts of Acapulco, according to local police.

Jimenez, 45, who also founded a citizens' self-defense group in Guerrero in 2013, 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 last year.

The students were teachers-in-training at Ayotzinapa Normal School, in Tixtla, Guerrero — a school that caters to the rural poor and is known for political activism. 

Police reportedly opened fire on the students in Iguala at the behest of its mayor, and in the aftermath 43 students went missing. Classmates of the missing students say they were “disappeared” for speaking out against government policies.

The government, in turn, has said the students were abducted by police and handed over to drug traffickers who allegedly killed the students and burned their bodies. Critics have questioned the government's version of events.

Frustrated with the Mexican government’s efforts to find the missing students, Jiménez led a group throughout Guerrero in search of the missing. Last December, Jiménez described the hills that surround Iguala as a cemetery, according to the BBC. So far the group has found 130 bodies and turned them over to authorities, according to several media outlets.

Acapulco, a city of about 800,000, saw 404 homicides in the first six months of this year, compared to 281 in the same period of 2014. The murder rate still remains below the peak of 524 murders in the first half of 2012.

Javier Morlet Macho, a community activist who sits on the citizens' police advisory board in Acapulco, said the rise in killings suggests a new gang may be carrying out “a cleanup operation” to eradicate rivals as it moves into the territory.

Guerrero state, which has one of the highest murder rates in Mexico, saw 1,514 homicides in 2014, according to federal statistics, which report 943 homicides this year through June.

Decades of Mexico’s so-called Dirty War, and the heavily militarized “war on drugs” that followed, have led to the disappearance or deaths of thousands who opposed government policies. In Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, citizens' self-defense groups have risen in reaction to drug-related violence.

Al Jazeera and wire services