Civilians probing student deaths killed

Mexico has seen six murders in the past month of men and women attempting to find out what happened 10 months ago to 43 college students who were abducted at gunpoint by armed forces in the western “narco-state” of Guerrero, writes Amanda Hopkinson. On 9 August, Miguel Ángel Jiménez Blanco, 45, was found murdered at the wheel of his taxi. A leader of the self-styled “Community Police” investigating the students’ disappearance, Jiménez was a vocal critic of President Peña Nieto’s right-wing government, widely held to be responsible for blocking progress in recovering either the students or their remains. Less than two weeks earlier five people investigating the deaths, with their associates, were “executed”, each with a single shot from a 9mm pistol. As hundreds gathered at Xialtianguis church for Jiménez’s wake, Archbishop Raúl Vera López of Saltillo, said: “State terrorism occurs.”