Movement for Peace with Justice plans caravan to the U.S. capital

Translated by CIP Intern Michael Kane

CNN Mexico: In August, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia will lead a new caravan, this time to the United States, to call for the U.S. Government to put an end to the illegal arms to Mexico, which “has only left pain and many dead.”

Sicilia announced that the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), which he leads, will prepare a protest in the U.S. capital, in which he hopes various Mexican and U.S. civil organizations will participate.

At the event, protestors will ask the U.S. to stop aid to Mexico earmarked through the Merida Initiative, a plan devised in 2007 by the George W. Bush Administration to contribute to the fight against organized crime, since “it’s not working,” said Sicilia.

The Caravan seeks “to raise awareness within the American, Mexican, and Central American populations of the pain and suffering that this violence has caused us,” that has caused more than 47,000 deaths since December 2006, added Sicilia, who did not specify the route.

“The U.S. should take responsibility for the violence that endures in Mexico, because in a certain way it has contributed to the thousands of deaths caused by weapons which came to our territory illegally,” he said.

The United States, “the number one consumer of drugs” in the world, “has a legal industry, that of arms, which is arming the Mexican criminal,” contended the poet at the end of a press conference presenting Marcel Sisniega’s latest film based on his novel “A través del silencio” (Behind the Silence)

According to Sicilia, the wave of violence unleashed in the country as a result of the dispute between drug cartels for territorial control and their confrontation with security forces has left around “50,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared, and 120,000 displaced.” Spanish original