Human rights activist, Miriam Rodríguez Martínez, was killed on May 10, by gunmen who broke into her homeand shot her 12 times

A Mexican businesswoman who headed a group of 600 families searching for their disappeared relatives has been killed.
Miriam Rodríguez Martínez was shot in her home in the town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas state.
She was known for successfully investigating the kidnap and murder of her daughter by a local drug cartel, the Zetas.
The information she gave the police ensured the gang members were jailed.
But in March one of them escaped and her colleagues said she started to receive threats.
She was killed on Mexico’s mother’s day, 10 May.
Her colleagues said she had asked for police protection but was ignored.
State prosecutor Irving Barrios told a news conference that security needs had been met and police officers made rounds three times a day. Her family disputes this.
The Mexican human rights commission issued a statement saying it deplored her murder and called for a full investigation.

The UN in Mexico tweeted its condemnation of the obvious assassination

Amnesty International ) And the Office in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner (UN-DH), noted that ‘the assassination of Tamaulipan activist Miriam Elizabeth Rodriguez Martinez once again showed the Mexican authorities’ negligence and inability to protect human rights defenders and victims in the country’.
In two separate statements, the organizations expressed their condemnation against the murder of Rodríguez, who created the San Fernando Disappeared Persons Collective, Tamaulipas, after the disappearance and murder of his daughter Karen in 2012. The woman had been threatened On many occasions, and thwarted an attempt to kidnap her husband.
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Mothers march in a protest against the government of mexico demanding to know the fate of their missing children

“The murder of an activist who led the search for her daughter and thousands more in Tamaulipas exposes the daily danger faced by those who are searching for the more than 30,000 people missing in the country,” -Amnesty International

said Amnesty International in a statement.
The group she established was part of a wider trend which mushroomed after the October 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the southwestern state of Guerrero.
Frustrated by a lack of government help, groups of families began their own searches for people who had disappeared in their areas, taking courses in forensic anthropology, archaeology, law, buying caving equipment and becoming experts in identifying graves and bones.
There are now at least 13 of these groups across the country.
The UN-DH noted that the killers adopted an “even more chilling symbolism” by killing women on Mother’s Day, “a date that in recent years has become an emblem of the demand for justice and visibility of the struggle they lead Out families of missing persons, “he said.

What happened to our sons? Angry mothers held a protest in Mexico city Thursday, holding portraits of their missing sons during an anti-government march.

The administration of former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) militarised the Mexican security forces to fight the drug cartels.
In 10 years, the ‘war on drugs’ he launched left tens of thousands of murder victims with numbers varying widely between civic institutions and government figures.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) issued its annual survey of armed conflict on Tuesday, saying that 23,000 people had died in Mexico in armed conflict in 2016, a figure disputed by the government of Mexican.
The State Government has expressed its strongest condemnation of this cowardly murder and will not allow the death of Mrs. Rodríguez to go unpunished. Meanwhile, the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office yesterday announced that it has opened an investigation into the murder of Rodríguez Martínez.