Dec 3, 2012

Juarez Pronouncement

Original Americas Program Translation 
Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, December 1st 2012

To the citizens of Juarez,
To the social organizations of Juarez,
To the social organizations of Mexico,
To the free citizens,

On the eve of the end of his term - one of the darkest in the history of the country and particularly fatal for our city – the social organizations signatories testify the social, political, and moral debt with which Felipe Calderon ends his term.

Over the past six years, as organizations, we supported various community processes and found the trail of terror, death and impunity that this regime planted in every corner of our city. The dimensions of the devastation, product of the "war on drugs", are only comparable with the pain of loosing our loved ones.

In the context of barbarism, the numbers do not quite capture the magnitude of the horror in which Felipe Calderon plunged the country with the pretext of eradicating the drug cartels, whose operations and structures - by the way - remains untouched. The "collateral damage", as he euphemistically called the country's thousands dead, the missing, orphaned, and displaced have names. For each of them we will seek justice.

From working daily with people on the streets, in neighborhoods, in schools, in churches, in universities, in community spaces we have witnessed how each of those lives taken away - a corollary of militarization and the establishment of a unprecedented police state - represent an irretrievable part of our present and future. The damage done has shut down a part of our dreams and has broken our future.
And it is precisely for the future of our children that despite everything we all seek to continue working toward the construction of a better Juarez for everyone. Today as the final hours of the this administration of the death run out and the looming commencement of one that is also not promising, we reaffirm our demand for justice and our conviction to work for the truth about the consequences of the so-called war on drugs and thereby punish those who from the federal, state, and local governments diverted and transgressed their use of power.

We encourage the progressive organizations of the city and the country, to join the various efforts to prosecute those who used the state apparatus against its citizens causing the most severe human rights crisis in the history of Ciudad Juarez , the State of Chihuahua and contemporary Mexico. As social organizations we will go to all actors - even international courts - to make our voices heard.

With the imminent inauguration of the presidency we do not accept the "haiga sido como haiga sido" as the State’s reason to dismiss our rights. We remind Enrique Peña Nieto, elected with a minimum margin of majority, that the only way to pacify the country and our institution is through truth and justice. Initiatives such as 'Todos Somos Juarez' not only obscenely exemplifies the governmental simulation in responding to the people’s demand for answers, but also the failure to alter their intended programs whose center does not prioritize the people and their dignity, nor seeks to supply law enforcement with assistentialist imitations. We affirm that there will be no reconstruction without justice and that this is the principle that is to guide our action. Justice is the first: Nothing in Juarez without justice. Nothing in Mexico without justice.

By the Justice Coordination Group in Juarez

Center for Human Rights Paso del Norte
Human Rights Migrant Center
City Council for Social Development
Women of Juarez Board
Collective: Art, Community, and Equity
Independent Grassroots Organization
Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights
Juarez Strategic Plan
Citizen Medical Committee
Program Partners

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