“My son was 26 years old, was a professional, and played sports.” Javier Sicilia’s deep, pained voice describing his son killed in Cuernavaca, an innocent victim in Mexico’s drug war, pierced my heart as I sat in LA Central Library, listening to him last spring.
Recounting the two caravans that crossed Mexico last year, he spoke about a movement based on humanizing all involved and invited us to join him for the U.S. version.
I wanted to get on that caravan. Like many in the U.S., I’d heard news about murdered journalists and massacres in Mexico. But my family in Mexico City assured me that they were fine. It was easy for me to keep my blinders on.
But hearing the sorrow in his voice and describing the grief of so many others—70,000 dead and 10,000 disappeared over the 6-year presidential term of Felipe Calderon—finally I had the courage to face the tragedies scarring my family’s homeland.
“You are not alone, you are not alone!” rose the chants in Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church after Rosa Perez’s tearful remembrance of her 26-year-old daughter, Coral, as she held up her picture. She disappeared on her way home to Monterrey from Reynosa with five other young women.
Because of her and the other family members whose testimonies I have witnessed for 10 days, I am finally paying enough attention to get clear that the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, the organization born out of the massive march in March 2011—the first action Sicilia led upon his son’s death—places the blame for narco-violence squarely on Felipe Calderon’s militarization of the drug war against traffickers that has only led to an escalation of violence that now includes thousands of innocent victims.
And as this U.S. caravan of over 100 seeks to highlight, equal responsibility belongs to the U.S. for funding Mexico’s military, lax monitoring of U.S.-manufactured gun trafficking (90% of Mexican narco-weapons) as well as money laundering by U.S. institutions.
But it’s a lot more complicated than getting the U.S. to stop funding the Mexican military, because the violent competition of drug trafficking among cartels exists as a result of the U.S. demand.
Ending U.S. funding would not stop narco-violence among cartels.
I am becoming more and more convinced, as the Movement for Peace suggests, that it would be more effective to end the prohibition of drugs. Keeping them illegal maintains a black market that fuels the violent competition. Instead, we could regulate drugs like we do alcohol. Better yet would be to put our resources into healing the sources of pain, alienation and anxiety that lead to drug use and abuse in our country.
This caravan has also brought into sharp focus for me how massive and self-destructive is the price we are paying for our own drug war with the mass incarceration of our population, much of it due to the criminalization of non-violent drug possession. Waking up to our own crisis will help us see how intertwined our tragedies are with Mexico’s.
All these testimonies have left an indelible mark on my heart and on my commitment to Mexico to embrace Javier Sicilia’s call, “You have to take responsibility in this country for your part, only united can we stop this imbecilic war.”
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