López narrates how her 19-year-old daughter, Jahaira Guadalupe Vaena López, was abducted in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. She describes her efforts to get the authorities to investigate the crime, how she was warned not to press the matter, how informants told her that her daughter was murdered in a turf battle between fractured drug gangs. Just days before leaving for the United States with the Caravan for Peace, she faced one of the assassins who had been apprehended and listened as he described in detail how her daughter was raped and beheaded.

Margarita has joined some 50 grieving family members to accompany caravan leader Javier Sicilia on a trip across the United States. Sicilia, a poet who lost his son to drug war violence in March of 2011, catalyzed a movement of victims and Mexican citizens fed up with the bloodshed that has claimed more than 60,000 lives and left tens of thousands more disappeared since former President Felipe Calderon launched the drug war five years ago.

Mexico’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity decided to organize the U.S. caravan after taking two caravans from Mexico City–one north to Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border, and one south to the border with Guatemala. Both drew out victims of the drug war and registered their cases to provide support for family members seeking justice and solace.

The decision to take their pain across the border came after discussion with the San Francisco-based group Global Exchange. Soon a coalition came together that included Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the Latin American Working Group, the RFK Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, our CIP Americas Program, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, among the key players. The coalition later expanded to include the NAACP, and local organizations in each of the cities along the route.

A binational meeting in June defined five demands of the U.S. caravan: to open public debate on humane alternatives to drug prohibition, to ban the import of assault weapons and crack down on illegal gun smuggling over the border, to combat money-laundering with full investigation and strict enforcement, to suspend all aid to the Mexican armed forces and end the war on drugs abroad, and to halt the militarization of the border and criminalization of migrants.

I joined the caravan on the final east coast leg of its 6,000-mile trip. I had heard most of the stories before in Mexico, having accompanied the northern caravan and numerous marches and meetings.

I was curious to see the impact on people in the United States. As the women in the room told their stories, each one struck like a cold blade in the heart. Although women are a minority of the war’s deaths, attacks on women usually include brutal sexual violence, and women make up the majority of those actively seeking justice and an end to the war.

Along the route, caravan members like these women have become confident and eloquent spokespersons to end the drug war. They speak from the heart and appeal to the heart. Their empowerment as leaders is one of the most important achievements of the caravan. Another is the sympathy and outrage their testimonies evoke.

And it’s not a one-way street. Caravan members also listened to the stories of U.S. citizens. Like Kimberly Armstrong in Baltimore, whose 16-year-old son was shot and killed by a 14-year-old in endemic drug violence. Or Carole Eady, who struggled her way out of the stigma and life disruption of imprisonment for a drug offense in New York City.

The threads begin to come together. In her brilliant book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander notes that in Washington, D.C., the caravan’s last stop, it’s estimated that three out of four black men can expect to serve time in prison. She calls this mass incarceration of black people a new racial caste, the latest Jim Crow system of social control, where young black men and women are jailed, stigmatized, and in many cases disenfranchised for life by discriminatory drug laws.

Based on the shared sorrow of losing loved ones to jail, violence, death, or disappearance, Mexicans and Americas found they fight the same unjust system of social control of the poor and people of color. The drug war generates profits for the defense industry and siphons public funds into perpetuating itself. It rips apart families and communities, north and south of the border. The bogus attempt to eliminate rather than regulate something in great demand creates a multibillion-dollar black market run by groups that become more violent as they are selectively attacked. It pits security forces against the public, providing them with the tools to violate human rights and life with impunity. It erodes democracy and the rule of law it purports to uphold.

Whether it’s through imposing a military/police state in Mexico or shunting youth into the margins of society, the drug war machine runs on the human lives it destroys.

A binational peace movement?

The caravan’s call to end the drug war resonated in city after city. But has the caravan forged a binational movement for peace?

Not yet. As the Mexican caravaners go back home, their U.S. hosts return to daily life. Many will simply guard the memory of Mexico’s pain and begin to read the news a little differently.

But others will act. The Peace Caravan has already achieved something remarkable. It brought together groups in U.S. cities that scarcely knew each other before. Some community organizers in the scores of cities from San Diego to the nation’s capital plan to continue the dialogue with the Mexican movement and among themselves.

In New York City, the Latino and African-American communities plan a meeting to discuss the impact of mass arrests and detention. In Baltimore, the movement to block construction of yet another multimillion-dollar prison in one of the nation’s most economically devastated cities is making common cause with movements for drug policy reform, racial justice, and youth rights.

In Texas, faith-based organizations advocating stricter enforcement of gun laws are intensifying their campaign against gun show sales and arms smuggling after seeing close up the human cost of the flow of guns to Mexico. In Arizona, human rights organizations working against the militarization of the border and the death and detention of migrants came face-to-face with activists protesting Mexico’s militarized drug war in a cross-border reflection. In Washington, members of Congress received caravan lobbyists whose power to convince came not from money or influence, but from human empathy and reason.

The way many U.S. citizens understand the drug war has changed through meeting the Mexicans who bear the brunt of it. While U.S. politicians and media portray it as a necessary fight against the threat that organized crime supposedly poses to national security in both countries, the victims spoke of the violence that resulted from the war on drugs itself. Audiences and congressional representatives were surprised to learn that many of the victims on the caravan accused not gangs but the U.S.-funded Mexican police and military for the murder or disappearance of their loved ones.

Organizers now face the question of how the moral victory can lead to a political one. On the drug policy front, U.S. society seems to be moving toward a tipping point despite push-back from law enforcement and private prison interests that make big money off incarceration, as well as from politicians who convert insecurity into “law and order” votes. A recent poll shows Colorado could legalize marijuana in the November elections after a similar measure narrowly lost in California. The award-winning film The House I Live In presents a stunning indictment of the domestic drug war through the words of its enforcers, its participants, and its victims.

But the federal government continues to be on the wrong side of the trend. Some hope that President Obama, if he is reelected, could make bolder moves toward reorienting a policy that imprisons so many mostly African-American youths and costs the nation $51 billion a year, according to the DPA. I’m inclined to agree with a LEAP editorial that warns the reform movement to watch the actions, not the rhetoric, of the Obama administration. It will take a stronger push from constituents to get the administration to take on the interests that benefit from sustaining America’s longest war.

Moral victories plant seeds that are often slow to bear fruit. Evaluating the experience on the last morning in a church hall, exhausted caravan members saw a mix of catharsis and consciousness-raising that gave them strength. Lopez noted that the “the tragedy I’m living through can be useful to a lot of people.” Melchor Flores, whose son was arrested in January of 2009 in Monterrey and never seen again, stated that the caravan had “touched consciences”.

He added, “Wherever my son is, he should be satisfied because he knew I wouldn’t let him down.”

Teresa Carmona, a tiny, white-haired woman whose son Joaquin was murdered in Mexico City, has become a powerful voice before the public and the media. She believes the caravan met its goal.

“We brought the faces of our beloved children, parents, and relatives all the way here, and so we legitimated this pain and this reality.”

In the nation that first invented the drug war and exported it to their country with deadly results, the Mexican bereaved have left a mark in the hearts of thousands of men and women. Sometimes it takes tragedy to make change. The cumulative histories recounted in the peace caravan represent a tragedy of mammoth proportions.

That should be more than enough to act on.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

But there is another problem with “spillover.” The concept, itself, is a politically motivated metaphor that prevents accurate perception of reality. Using the metaphor “spillover” implies that some force that ought to be contained on one side of a barrier, like water behind a dam, is overwhelming the barrier, endangering whatever is on the other side. This metaphor is being used in the context of another politically motivated metaphor — the “war on drugs.”

The metaphor of “war” attempts to create the perception that the drug issue is a “threat” coming from outside the boundaries of the United States. Therefore, it must — and can be — contained on “the other side,” if not eradicated at the “source” (see A Disastrous Metaphor: Waging Domesitc War). Thus, if any aspect of the “threat” of drugs, crosses the border, it is “spilling over.”

However, if we look at the reality, the drug trade is an integrated commercial process. It is the meeting of demand within the U.S. with supply from Mexico, through the exchange of goods for money. The trade transcends the official border. (The book, Line in the Sand by Rachel St. John talks not only about how arbitrary the U.S-Mexico border is in terms of geographic, economic and social realities, but also how borders actually create smugglers by attempting to interrupt commercial exchanges, aka “free trade.”)

From the point of view of trade dynamics, the border is an obstacle to trade. NAFTA and subsequent trade-centered actions of both the U.S. and Mexican governments — including the recent agreement to allow Mexican trucks into the U.S. interior — are aimed at reducing border obstacles. In talking about the economic benefits of Mexican-U.S. trade for Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer described the border as “bountiful.” Hence the money-laundering described so well in the New York Times article is not “spillover.” It is an integral part of a transnational trade process.

Goods sold by the Mexican cartels are excluded from legitimate international trade relations; hence, they are denied direct access to standard banking channels for currency exchange and transfer of large sums across national borders. So the cartels become inventive — using U.S. perfume merchants and Mexican currency exchange businesses. The money is not “spilling over.” It is flowing between markets.

We would also venture that drug trade-related violence is not “spillover violence.” Whether it occurs in Texas, other border states or even further north, whether it involves Mexican cartels or U.S. gangs, it is integrally related to the trans-border drug trade. This drug trade does not have access to civil means of conflict resolution and functions in a hyper-competitive environment — due to the inflated value of its prohibited products. Therefore, it resorts to violence to resolve disputes and issues of competition, whether those issues occur in Mexico or the U.S..

The general conclusion of a number of writers is that the cartels use U.S.-based gangs for distribution precisely because they don’t want to get entangled with U.S. police and courts. For the same reason, they don’t want to increase acts of violence north of the border. In this sense, the existence of a jurisdictional border actually prevents “spillover.”

AUTHOR: Reed Brundage
URL: http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: Americas [at] ciponline.org

In a 2004 ruling, the International Court of Justice determined that the United States was not granting death penalty convicts from Mexico their right to legal assistance by their own country.

Mexico’s legal system prohibits capital punishment and a treaty with the United States forbids Mexican authorities from extraditing criminals to the United States who face the death penalty if tried in states that utilize some method of execution.
However, a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision stipulates that the legal support of a foreign government — or governments — is not required in deciding whether to execute a foreign national convicted of a capital offense. The 6-3 majority ruled that state court judges are given the discretion to decide how a sentence is carried out.

That high court decision cleared the way for Texas to execute Mexican citizen Jose Ernesto Medellin by lethal injection in 2008.

However, the U.S. Congress is trying to resolve the conflicting court decisions with legislation. The pending congressional bill — supported by the liberal-left — would require states to obey requirements of international treaties, such as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

The Mexican ambassador is urging Texas to delay final judgment on the execution until Congress decides what it will do.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, which supports the bill, has threatened to withhold federal funding from states that stray from the rules of international treaties. His position angers U.S. Constitutionalists because it places foreign law on a par with U.S. founding documents and U.S. jurisprudence.

“President [Obama's] position and that of the far-left is that the U.S. Constitution is an important document as long as its provisions coincide with those of the United Nations and other internationalist organizations such as the European Union,” said Mike Baker, an attorney and political strategist.

Even a U.S. State Department adviser wrote a request to District Judge Maria Teresa Herr of Bexar County, Texas, asking her to reconsider Leal’s death penalty under terms of the Vienna treaty.

“To her credit, Judge Herr scheduled the execution of Leal for July. She deserves the thanks of all patriotic Americans,” said Baker.

Joining the protests is a group of politicians and diplomats that include two former presidents, U.S. Army generals and ambassadors. Among them is former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering and former FBI director Williams Sessions. The presidents are Carter and Clinton, both progressives who believe in one world governance.

They wrote a letter to Governor Perry seeking his reconsideration of the death penalty in this and other death penalty case involving foreign nationals.

“The message these leftist politicians wish to send the world is: come to America, kill and rape. You will not be executed,” quipped Baker.

AUTHOR: Jim Kouri
URL: http://www.renewamerica.com/
E-MAIL: COPmagazine [at] aol.com

“The President implying, we’ve done enough, the border is secure, does not make it so. Our border is definitely not secure. The Government Accountability Office has determined that only 15 percent of the border is under operational control. The time has come for real action, not words.”

In an obvious campaign speech on Tuesday in Texas, President Obama heralded the great successes of his administration including his policies on border security and illegal aliens. But many found his speech lacking in substance especially when in the same speech he took bows for a robust economy that few outside his administration can see, according to several law enforcement officials who spoke to the Law Enforcement Examiner.

Despite two congressional reports documenting the obstacles Border Patrol officers face in these dangerous areas, little has been done to remedy the situation and improve security. An overwhelming majority of Border Patrol agents told congressional investigators that certain restrictions continue to limit their access to lands along the treacherous southwestern border.

U.S. Rep. Peter T. King, Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, released a statement following President Obama’s speech on his plan to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants:

“The President has again called for amnesty for illegal immigrants without offering a single proposal to actually improve the security of our borders. After nearly two-and-a-half years in office, President Obama has yet to present the American people with a comprehensive plan for securing the border against illegal immigration.”

“The President implying, we’ve done enough, the border is secure, does not make it so. Our border is definitely not secure. The Government Accountability Office has determined that only 15 percent of the border is under operational control. The time has come for real action, not words.”

The situation is so dire that a group of lawmakers have introduced legislation to prohibit any federal agency — especially the Department of the Interior — from using environmental regulations to hinder the Border Patrol from securing the area. The measure would essentially ensure that Border Patrol, not federal land managers, have operational control of the nation’s borders.

During one of Napolitano’s press conferences she claimed the Department of Homeland Security has initiated unprecedented measures to strengthen border security while avoiding any hindrance of trade and travel along the Southwest border.

Napolitano spoke about the importance of border security in El Paso, Texas as if she was just realizing how serious the problem of border security — or lack of security — is in U.S. cities and towns adjacent to the Mexican border, say law enforcement officials.

According to Secretary Napolitano, her border security index will include crime, immigration, and economic data. Following her announcement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a press statement, “Secretary Napolitano’s so-called border security index will be nothing short of inflated facts and figures to give them an excuse to say the border is secure. The Administration has cooked the books on border security for the past two years and I don’t expect the results of their index to be any different.”

“The Government Accountability Office and Border Patrol agents on the ground know the truth. According to a recent GAO report, only 44 percent of the Southwest border is under the ‘operational control’ of the Border Patrol. Mexican drug cartels are out of control and the violence threatens to spill over into the United States. And each year, millions of illegal immigrants enter the U.S.,” said Rep. Smith.

“No matter what kind of index the Administration produces, they cannot change the facts and the truth. The reality is that there are massive holes in security along the Southern border and the Obama administration has ignored this growing problem for the past two years,” the Republican lawmaker stated.

“The Administration’s index is just an excuse for inaction. We don’t need a make-believe index; we need action. There is no substitute for improved border security coupled with increased interior enforcement of drug and immigration laws,” Rep. Smith added.

AUTHOR: Jim Kouri
URL: http://www.renewamerica.com/
E-MAIL: COPmagazine [at] aol.com