¡No Mas Sangre!: U.S. should say enough to Mexico drug violence

OpEd in the LA Times by Rubén Martínez, a professor at Loyola Marymount University

Mexico drug war: U.S. should say enough to Mexico drug violence - Los Angeles Times: " The drug war is perceived as Mexico's, not ours, never mind that the weapons doing the bloodletting are in great part supplied by the United States — and not just through private dealers. We are implicated in the violence through the Mérida Initiative, a U.S.-led program that provided $750 million in technical support in 2009 and 2010 for the Mexican military, which promotes itself as above the corruption of state and local police but which has had thousands of human rights complaints logged against it, according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission.

And of course Americans have a more personal connection with the "Mexican" drug war. There is no innocent recreational drug use. Most of the cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine consumed in the United States is produced in or transported through Mexico. Almost all the blood spilled in the war has been in Mexico, but perhaps our bloodshed is the devastation experienced by addicts, their families and their communities.

I am years clean, long finished with the cocaine that I was once addicted to, but I cannot claim that my hands are clean. I was part of a global market, played my role as a consumer, entered the vast constellation of relationships that pushes and pulls drugs, money and guns across the border — and takes its toll on both sides.

There must be a language of "we" in this war because we are all its victims and victimizers. Let us listen to Javier Sicilia: "Estamos hasta la madre." Or we should be — all of us.

...That italicized phrase..."estamos hasta la madre," invokes "mother," as Mexicans often do in Spanish, in an elastic and metaphorical way. We are up to our "mother" in this suffering; we can take it no more; it has violated the most profound and sacred spaces of our spirit."