Gunmen kill Mexican activist for parents of missing children

According to The New York Times a Mexican woman who became an activist for parents of missing children after her daughter was kidnapped and murdered five years ago was fatally shot by gunmen who broke into her home this week, the authorities said Thursday May 11.

The woman, Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez, who lived in the municipality of San Fernando, was killed late Wednesday, May 10 — Mother’s Day in Mexico. She died on the way to a hospital.

San Fernando is in the state of Tamaulipas, which runs along the Gulf Coast up to the jagged southeastern border of Texas. It is among the most violent regions of Mexico. According to government figures, it has the highest number of disappeared people in the country. So many journalists have been threatened into silence by gangs there that the stranglehold of organized crime goes largely unreported.

Karen Alejandra Salinas Rodríguez, Ms. Rodríguez’s daughter, vanished in 2012. Ms. Rodríguez began a search that lasted two years, until her daughter’s body was discovered in an unmarked grave. Afterward, she told the authorities who she believed was responsible for the murder.

She then took part in efforts to help parents whose children had disappeared, and she became the director of the organization Colectivo de Desaparecidos de San Fernando.

Some of the men who had been arrested in her daughter’s case recently escaped from prison. Ms. Rodríguez had said in interviews that she received death threats from criminal organizations and that the local authorities did not protect her.

But according to Reuters, the attorney general of Tamaulipas, Irving Barrios, said the state had been protecting Ms. Rodríguez, sending police patrols to her house three times a day. Mr. Barrios also said that nine people had been put on trial in the kidnapping and murder of her daughter.

On Twitter, the state’s governor, Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, condemned the killing of Ms. Rodríguez. “The government of Tamaulipas will not allow the death of Miriam Rodríguez to turn into yet another statistic,” he wrote. “#NoToImpunity.”

Source: www.nytimes.com