Mexico Marches for Peace in the US

The Poet Javier Sicilia Leads a Caravan Calling on Washington to Rethink Its Anti-drug Policy

Last Sunday in San Diego, Calif., Javier Sicilia, the Mexican poet who abandoned poetry following the murder of his young son, Juan Francisco, in March, 2011, embarked on a pilgrimage that will culminate in the U.S. capital on Sept. 12. Routed through 20 cities, the Caravan for Peace will call on Washington to stop the war on drugs, which is having little effect on the supply of narcotics to the U.S. and is failing to prevent assault weapons sold on U.S. soil from ending up in criminal hands south of the Rio Bravo.

“We are going to tell the American people that behind their addicts and behind the war declared by their government lie our dead and our missing,”* said Sicilia on Friday at a press conference in the Mexican capital before traveling to Tijuana. “This war is jeopardizing democracy. We have to tackle the root causes of the problem and build peace, otherwise we will lose our nation and our rights.”*

Sicilia, leader of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, will march with 110 people, among them 54 direct victims of the tragedy that, as part of the war on drugs, has left 70,000 dead and 20,000 missing in Mexico, according to figures produced by the Movement. Supported by 80 organizations, the Caravan for Peace will cover 5,840 miles through cities in states like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and New York before it reaches the U.S. capital.

The march aims to raise awareness of the futility of the current strategy, of illegal arms trafficking, of the urgent need to combat money-laundering effectively and to renew international agreements aimed at containing criminals, as well as to warn of the threat to immigrants from mafias.

This is the third march for Sicilia, whose mobilizations in Mexico have been successful in giving a voice to victims of the anti-crime initiatives launched by President Felipe Calderon in Dec. 2006. For years, Calderon stood by the argument that the murder victims were known suspects of organized crime. The government’s position fell apart when, among the “collateral damage,” stories began to emerge of women who were on their way to the bakery, students mistaken for villains, teenage athletes mistaken for gang members and even children returning home from a walk.

As a result of Sicilia’s previous two caravans — one through Mexico’s northern states and another through the south — hundreds of relatives of victims overcame their fear and claimed justice for murdered or missing loved ones. The vast majority of the crimes remain unsolved and uninvestigated.

“[The United States] has created a war for us, now we are going to demand they build peace and stop this war,”* said Sicilia just hours before setting off with the latest caravan. How many will join the poet’s quixotic crusade on U.S. soil? It’s hard to predict, though many Mexicans living in the United States have relatives still living in the war-torn regions they come from.

Sergio Aguayo, an analyst specializing in Mexican-U.S. relations and, since last year, a supporter of the Alto campaign against arms smuggling, has said “if the American people listen to us, they will understand and they will support us. It’s not neighborly to allow a war to go on, for us to have a humanitarian tragedy due to the greed of a handful of death merchants who are profiting from illegal arms contraband in Mexico, because those arms are being used to massacre my family, my people.”*

Today some of those people will arrive in Los Angeles, the second city on the Caravan for Peace’s route, where a group of American and Mexican artists is expected to add their voices to Sicilia’s cry: Stop the war.

*Editor’s note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.