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

Simon Denyer/The Washington Post – Children rescued from a bangle-making factory in New Delhi after a police raid on Sept.5, 2012. More than 90,000 children go missing in India every year, many of them sold into forced labor on farms and in factories.

Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.

They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.

“It was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,” said his father, Iqbal Ali. “I used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.”

More than 90,000 children are officially reported missing every year, according to data compiled and released late last year by leading children’s rights group Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which showed the problem was far greater than previously thought.

Up to 10 times that number are trafficked, according to the group — boys and girls, most from poor families, torn from their parents, sometimes in return for cash, and forced to beg or work in farms, factories and homes, or sold for sex and marriage.

It is an epidemic that, until a few years ago, remained unreported and largely ignored by the authorities.

But years of tireless work by activists, a few crucial victories in court — and the shocking discovery of the bones of 17 slain girls and young women around a businessman’s home in a suburb of New Delhi called Nithari in 2006 — have gradually put the issue on the nation’s agenda.

India’s 24-hour news channels have also played a role in highlighting an issue long tolerated by the country’s middle classes. The media frenzy surrounding the Nithari killings was a watershed, reminiscent of the way the disappearance of Etan Patz in Manhattan in 1979 helped spark the missing-children’s movement in the United States.

In recent weeks, footage from surveillance cameras — a new phenomenon in modern India — has also been repeatedly broadcast on television here, showing infants being brazenly snatched from train stations and hospital lobbies as parents slept nearby.

“A couple of decades ago, there was no understanding of the issue of missing children or trafficking for forced labor — child labor was not even considered a crime,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, an activist for the children’s rights group. “Though things are slowly changing, the biggest issue is the lack of political and administrative will to enforce the law, which is often outside the reach of the common person.”

Irfan suffered perhaps the most common fate — kidnapped to satisfy India’s insatiable demand for cheap, agricultural labor.

In India and many other developing countries, children often work in agriculture. What is only now becoming apparent is the huge trafficking industry that has grown up outside the law.

Irfan’s story, though, has a happy ending. Last month, after more than two years away, he finally made it home to his joyous parents, after climbing on a chair in the shed where he was held and breaking a window with an earthen vase to escape.

“I was supposed to bathe the buffalo, to feed them, to pick up the dung,” he said, describing his life imprisoned in virtual solitary confinement in a room adjoining a buffalo shed outside the town of Mullanpur, some 200 miles northwest of Delhi.

“I was fed just once a day, just leftovers. When I used to shriek and make a fuss, they would tie my hands and feet at night.”

After escaping, Irfan found shelter with another family for several months. Then, last month, as the media furor about missing children reached its peak, he saw photographs of his parents and himself on a TV show.

Only then did he journey back to the New Delhi district of Nangloi, the only address he had in his memory.

“I took the train to Delhi, and a bus to Nangloi,” he said, “but when I arrived it had all changed. Before, there was no overpass, no metro. It looked like a completely different place to me.”

After half an hour of wandering, Irfan says he bumped into a friend, who took him home.

“We were just overwhelmed with happiness,” said his mother, Shabnam. “We went and got new clothes made for all of us. All his old clothes were too small, because he had grown so tall.”

Young laborers

Kidnapping represents just the tip of the iceberg of a vast child-trafficking industry in India. Many young children are sold by their parents or enticed from them with the promise that they will be looked after and be able to send money home. Never registered as missing, many simply lose touch with their parents, working long hours in garment factories or making cheap jewelry.

Globally, trafficking of children for forced labor and sexual exploitation remains a “largely hidden crime,” says the International Labor Organization, with no reliable data even existing on the scale of the problem.

The organization makes a “conservative estimate” that 5.5 million children around the world are trapped in forced labor, but in India alone the government uses estimates of 5 million to 12 million children forced to work.

On a recent raid with activists and police, 36 children were rescued from a series of tiny rooms where they were making bangles for 10 hours, some for just $4 a month.

One was just 6 years old, the son of a rickshaw puller from the faraway city of Patna, his hair and skin covered in glitter from the work. “They didn’t let me talk to my mother on the phone,” he said.

Last month, the Indian government proposed a blanket ban on the employment of children younger than 14, building on a 2009 law that established a child’s right to education until that age. Activists hailed the proposal, which now needs parliamentary approval, as a major step forward, but warned that enforcement will remain a significant challenge.

The U.S. State Department says India is making “significant efforts” to comply with minimum global standards for the elimination of trafficking, but notes challenges in enforcement and “the alleged complicity of public officials in human trafficking.”

Little help for the missing

The parents of several missing children interviewed in the past month said they had received little or no help from the police, largely, they said, because they were poor.

“The police were very cold. They just kept saying: ‘A lot of kids are missing. What can we do?’ ” said Kunwar Pal, 48, whose son, Ravi, was 12 when he went missing two years ago after going out to ride his bicycle. “Maybe if I had the money to pay a bribe, they would have found my kid.”

Nearly 450,000 cases of children trafficked for labor were reported in the past three years, but prosecutions were launched in just 25,000 of those cases and 3,394 employers were convicted, official figures show.

Twelve years ago, Pal’s wife died in childbirth, their infant daughter succumbing to diarrhea soon after. Now, in his bare one-roomed house, he pines for his favorite son, an obedient, undemanding and studious boy who dreamed of becoming a detective.

“He liked soap operas on TV, one called ‘CID,’ and he used to say he wanted to study and be educated and become a policeman,” said Pal, before breaking down in tears. “I am always expecting a call. ‘Papa, can I come home?’ ”

Rama Lakshmi and Suhasini Raj contributed to this report.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

AUTHOR: Bachpan Bachao Andolan
URL: http://www.bba.org.in
E-MAIL: info [at] bba.org.in

Dear Friends,

AUTHOR: Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi
URL: http://www.pvchr.net/
E-MAIL: pvchr.india [at] gmail.com