Miguel ángel Jiménez Blanco, a 45-year-old Mexican activist, has been murdered. Many knew him as a man who helped families look for relatives that had been lost to the everyday violence in the country.

Jimenez's corpse was found near his home in Xaltianguis, a small town in the south-western state of Guerrero, according to the BBC. He was found dead in the taxi he owned with a gunshot wound to the head.

Jiménez’s work was more than humanitarian in nature; it was a kind of political protest. Seeing that Mexican authorities were not doing all they could to protect Guerrero state's citizens, Jiménez helped to organize over 100 women to start patrolling the streets. Jiménez led search parties to try to find 43 missing student teachers, who disappeared in Guerrero under what are regarded as extremely suspicious circumstances that involved a drug gang working alongside the police.

A vocal leader of citizen self-defense groups in Guerrero, Jiménez informed CNN Mexico that more than 100 bodies had been found in hidden graves in the area since October.

"We left it clean and now again there are bad people here, but we have to do something, because I cannot leave this to my children," he said at the time.

"If something happens to one of my children I will never forgive myself," added Jiménez.

Speaking with the BBC, Jiménez said that after the 43 students went missing in Iguala, 300 families revealed that they had missing relatives as well. "We have been saying from the start that this area is a cemetery," said Jiménez.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, one of Jiménez's friends, Mario Vergara, said, “He taught us how to search and how to push and every day he would give us the energy to carry on.”

“They’ve killed Miguel -- we don’t know why, maybe because of the searches, as we were putting the heat on the government,” said Vergara, whose own brother went missing last year.

“But they’re not going to stop us,” he added.