Miguel Angel Jimenez, an outspoken opponent of cartel violence in Mexico, was found dead on a highway to Mexico City, according to Sport Act.
Jimenez began a self-defense group to fight back against cartel violence in 2013. He was also the leader of a civilian group attempting to locate 43 students who went missing in September 2014. According to Mexican prosecutors, the students were taken captive by corrupt local police officers. They were given to a drug gang, who killed them all. Only one of those bodies has been recovered.
Jimenez was the victim of murder. His body was found, full of bullet holes, in a car on the highway. He was near a town where he had helped to create a community police program. Jimenez had received death threats in the past, according to the New York Daily News.
"I don't do this because of me or the abuses we live now. I do this for the next generation and for my children," Jimenez said in an April 2015 interview. He made efforts to fight kidnapping, murders, extortions and other criminal acts carried out by Mexican drug cartels.
"He was always looking for somebody to help," Xitali Miranda, an activist who knew Jimenez said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
