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

The question then is: If a public consensus on the failure of the drug war, why hasn’t anything changed?

Why does the U.S. government continue to send millions of tax dollars to cities to fight the drug war, as they close down schools for lack of funds? Why does it waste more millions financing a bloody war in Mexico? Why does the Mexican government continue to pay the economic and political cost of a disastrous and destabilizing war? The U.S. has spent 2 billion dollars on the Mexican drug war in the past five years, mostly through the Merida Initiative and the Mexican government has spent at least four times that much.

To answer these questions, we have to look behind the scenes of the drug war. There we find that this disastrous policy has some powerful promoters.

Some fans of the drug war are open and upfront. They are politicians with clear ties to the military establishment and the business of war. Their job is to create conflict and then propose military solutions. They funnel government contracts to defense companies, and then the defense companies funnel funds into their political campaigns.

These politicians seem to have written the foreign policy part of the Republican Party platform. They have invented a new menace, “narco-terrorism”, that attempts to convince the public that the production and transit of illicit substances is equivalent to terrorism.

This is false. In Mexico, Latin America drugs are produced and trafficked. It’s an illegal business that thrives off drug prohibition. Terrorism is a violent political agenda. Anyone who cannot tell the difference between these two—drug cartels and terrorist organizations—should not be in a position to make policy.

There is no proof of terrorist cells operating permanently in Mexico or Latin America, but “narco-terrorism” is being used as an excuse to send the military out in these countries. Unfortunately, the Democrats Platform is very similar in its wholehearted endorsement of the military approach to drug trafficking.

The politicians manufacture the war for the companies that manufacture the weapons. In this cycle, the drug war is the latest market for intelligence and spy equipment, military hardware, arms and private security firms like Blackwater.

On this side of the border, security companies and local government offices that receive federal money to fight the drug war have a vested interest in continuing it. They know it doesn’t work. But it works for them.

The prison pipeline is big business now. For certain government bureaucracies, and for the private companies that run our prisons and press for more and bigger jails. They pressure for prison expansion, in places like here in Baltimore, where they figure it’s easier and more profitable to lock kids away then to educate them or provide them with decent jobs—especially African American and Latino youth. In the Southwest where the caravan passed through a few weeks ago, these same companies run the migrant detention centers, where women are raped and prisoners have died from lack of medical treatment. Where prisoners are made to feel, as one woman who had been incarcerated for drugs in New York told us, like “throwaway people”. No one is a throwaway person.

Public security, which should be the goal, is the greatest casualty of the drug war. All these victims are here to attest to the fact that fighting violence with violence generates more violence.

The drug war has also blurs the lines between security forces and criminal forces. Nothing makes sense in this insanity of violence. Two examples prove the point. Several weeks ago members of the Mexican Federal Police chased down and shot at a U.S. Embassy car carrying two CIA agents and a Mexican Navy official. The first question on everybody’s mind was: why were the Federal Police trying to kill the U.S. advisers? Aren’t they supposed to be on the same side in this war? The US has poured millions of taxpayer dollars into funding Mexico’s Federal Police and here they were not only biting, but trying to destroy the hand that feeds them. The second question, much less asked, was: Why were U.S. CIA agents training 18-year old Mexican Navy recruits to shoot their own people?

The second example comes from here in Baltimore. Yesterday we heard about a 16 year-old boy with his whole life ahead of him who was shot by a 14 year-old with an assault rifle. We learned that it’s easier to buy an assault rifle than a tomato in some neighborhoods of this city.

It’s been said before—the war on drugs is a war on people. Today we are surrounded with proof of the insanity of this war. We hear it in the voices of the victims and we see it in their tears. We honor the men and women here who have had to courage to tell these stories and to forge a movement for justice from the raw material of their pain.

No one believes that drug abuse is not a problem or that organized crime is not a problen in Mexico. They are. What we are saying is this way of dealing with real problems is not working. There are far better ways, paths toward an integral human security; health and community-based approaches. We have seen so much needless grief, we have been placed in harm’s way, by bad policy and governments that for the most part, just don’t care, in Mexico and in the United States.

Obama administration officials and those who benefit from the drug war say that the proposal to legalize marijuana is irresponsible. What is irresponsible is to continue a policy for more than 40 years when all available evidence shows it doesn’t work. It kills people. It incarcerates their bodies and lacerates their spirits.

Let us not be ambiguous

We must end the drug war now. We must reform our drug policy that makes drug use criminal and hands criminals a lucrative business. We need to take the multi-billion-dollar market away from the brutal cartels. If we stop the flow of money by ending prohibition, we cut off their lifeline.

We can end the drug war, maybe even before it reaches the ignominious hundred-year anniversary that former mayor Ken Schmoke mentioned. We can build better communities, better nations and a better relationship between our countries. But we can’t do it alone. We need to support our local organizations and we need to reach across borders.

Then we can join together, not just based on our shared sorrow and pain, but based on a common vision of a better future for ourselves and our families.

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

Kimberly Armstrong of Baltimore shares a hug with a caravan mother

As the peace caravan arrived in Baltimore yesterday morning, many of the 100-some people on board still slept, hunched over their seats or slumped on the shoulders of their bus mates. With a light summer rain falling, we began to pass row after row of abandoned houses. A member of a Baltimore host organization explained the background of a city that has been bombed out–not by aerial strikes, but by economic crisis. The results were strikingly similar.

Along North Avenue and Fulton Avenue, entire blocks of houses were boarded up and abandoned. Some have been gutted by time or rehab speculators. Others stand as they have for more than a hundred years, ready to house families behind their strong brick walls. Except that money, racism and the perversion of the financial system have blocked their doors. Families are on the street while houses remain empty.

We drove up to Irvington Park where a coalition of Baltimore groups hosted a picnic with the theme “Keep Them Home”. Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a community organization that works with imprisoned and recently released youth, greeted the caravan, along with the NAACP, Casa Maryland and others.

Two women rappers/singers performed works protesting the construction of yet another prison in a community that lacks basic services. Local groups like LBS have managed to block the prison so far and are working to have the multi-million dollar project cancelled altogether.

“I don’t know Spanish,” she told the caravan. “But I know a lot about losing a loved one.”

On Sept. 27, 2004, Armstrong’s sixteen year old son Eric was shot and killed. Just this February, she said, she heard a knock on the door. “It was the police. They told me they found my son’s murderer. he was shot with a 9mm rifle by a 14-year old.”

“I thought to myself, ‘why do we have 9mm rifles on the ground? how can it be that we live in a neighborhood where it’s easier for a 14-year old to get a gun, than it is to get a tomato.’”

Among the crowd, the many mothers and other relatives of the murdered and disappeared nodded. One woman’s lost son became the brother of the other’s.

“Now they are all my angels,” said Araceli Rodriguez, displaying the photo of Armstrong’s son alongside that of her own, kidnapped and disappeared in the state of Michoacan.

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

In his speech, called “A Time to Break Silence”, King cited his reasons to oppose the Viet Nam war. His words apply almost uncannily to the drug war today. Despite the difference in historical contexts and the differences between the two wars, their similarities and the truth of the words stand not only the test of time but the test of conscience as well.

Both wars were, and are, deadly; both unconventional for their time; both fought for motivations distinct from those professed to the people.

The first reason King listed to oppose the war was “the war as an enemy of the poor”. He had watched as advances in fighting poverty and inequality were dismantled to feed the war machine. The trade-off was starkly obvious:

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

We also know that today. With a budget in crisis, social programs have been stripped in historic rollbacks of rights and living standards as the defense budget not only maintains its girth but grows. With the Middle East conflicts waning in attention, it’s the drug war that has moved in to justify militarism’s insatiable appetite.

In Mexico, where the financial crisis, free trade and governmental indifference have created some 12 million more poor people in just a few years, the drug war has absorbed an enormous part of the budget. The war economy in both countries has powerful backers, and the added advantage for them of not only keeping the poor poor, but eliminating a large number of them, behind bars or in mass graves.

That’s, of course, his second reason.

[The war] was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

Today’s drug war doesn’t even have to send young men and women thousands of miles away. It puts them away right here at home. By the millions and with the same discriminatory criteria that sent the poor and African American to fight and die in Viet Nam.

The peace caravan from Mexico marched in a candlelight vigil through the heart of Harlem, Manhattan’s poorest areas. A place where everyday youth are plucked to fill the cells and coffers of a private prison system. Where drug laws do the dirty work of justifying criminalization based on race and poverty and treating victims as villains.

Carol Eady of Woman on the Rise Telling Her Story (WORTH), a former prisoner on drug charges who has kicked drugs and become an educator and community activist, explained at the church,

Many women in New York, and probably all over the world, are usually incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Most of the time, they started using drugs due to past abuse, abandonment by parents, victimization and sexual assaults. Instead of treating these occurrences as health hazards or diseases, when we turn to drugs to medicate our pain, they lock us up.  

More than 400 people chanted ‘No More Drug War’ and called for justice in the streets of Harlem. The “cruel manipulation of the poor” that King spoke of is the modus operandi of the drug war and the prisons are the new battlefields where young lives are lost.

King’s third reason stemmed from his deep commitment to non-violence.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. 

Likewise, if we do not oppose the drug war, we cannot claim to be non-violent and credibly stand up against more conventional wars or invasions or call ourselves non-violent. The U.S. government’s Merida Initiative promotes violence and militarization as a solution to drug trafficking. We either condone that and abandon all pretenses of non-violence or we oppose it despite its political popularity and remain consistent in our beliefs.

By keeping silent since Bush launched the Merida Initiative in 2007, we have allowed the militarized drug war model to spread. Now both political parties have elevated counter-narcotics efforts to national security, as if a white powder used to get high could blow up the world or a corner dealer were tantamount to a terrorist. This is a blatant lie. We are supporting a prohibition model where Mexican communities suffer the presence of violent and corrupt security forces and drug gangs, both funded and armed in part by our country. Violence becomes the norm and moral outrage dulls through endless repetition.

Another reason is the “vocation of sonship and brotherhood”, a religious calling that–when women are added into the language–demands making common cause and understanding the suffering of others. The caravan, above all, has sought over this past month to forge those bonds and bring out that common cause. The victims, with their photos of murdered or missing loved ones and stories of pain, have challenged the U.S. public to consider the devastation wrought by support of a drug war without end. 

The stories at Riverside, 45 years later, again broke the silence about the war. Not a war on a foreign continent, but a crossborder war that rages within our communities from Harlem to Jalisco. As the U.S. government extends the failed drug war from Colombia and Mexico, to Central America, the Caribbean and Africa king’s closing words fit now as then:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam [in the drug war] and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors.

Annihilation drags us all into more violence. We have alternatives. As hundreds of marchers moved through New York city with the pictures of the victims, calling for an end to the war–again–they carried us closer to what King called “a creative psalm of peace”.

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

A week after a van with diplomatic plates was ambushed by Mexican Federal Police members, wounding two CIA agents, neither the U.S. or Mexican governments have much to say about the incident.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland treated a question on the attack like the political hot potato it is. She seemed to plead for the next question, and the lack of diligence by the reporter made for an easy dodge.

QUESTION: Additionally, there’s been an increasing controversy in Mexico over the incident with the U.S. diplomatic convoy, particularly the firing on the U.S. diplomatic van. The Embassy in Mexico initially classified it as an ambush. The Mexican Government says it was an accident. Which is it? And then can you confirm some of the – what were these two individuals (inaudible) link – to what U.S. agency were they linked?

MS. NULAND: As you know, the Mexican Government is investigating this incident. Our Embassy is cooperating in that investigation and trying to assist it in any way that we can. I’m not going to get ahead of the investigation – I think we’re going to wait and see what that concludes – nor am I going to get into speculating on any of the specifics until we see what the investigation leads to.
Please.
QUESTION: Just a follow-up: Have you taken any extra steps to protect U.S. borders in Mexico after this incident?
MS. NULAND: Well, we –
QUESTION: Are you worried about this?
MS. NULAND: We always are in a strong security posture around the world as necessary, but we don’t speak about any of the details of that.
Anything else? Please.

It seems both the U.S. and Mexican governments have handed down a gag order on the strange incident. On the U.S. side the DEA came out with a statement denying that any of their agents were involved. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported what the Mexican paper La Jornada had reported earlier:

The two Americans who were wounded when gunmen fired on an American Embassy vehicle last week were Central Intelligence Agency employees sent as part of a multiagency effort to bolster Mexican efforts to fight drug traffickers, officials said on Tuesday.

What do we know and not know about the ambush?

1. The van was taking the two CIA agents to train new Navy recruits at a firing range outside Mexico City. It was clearly identified and well-known to people in the area. The U.S. government has often cited its preference for the Navy and mistrust of the Army in Mexico, so Navy war games having nothing to do with water are common in this drug war.
2. A green Chrysler drove up and blocked the way of the Toyota van. The driver immediately threw the car into reverse to escape. (First question: If this were indeed a case of mistaken identity, how did the driver immediately know this was an attack?)
3. A second car cut off passage from behind. Shots were fired but the Toyota was armored.
4. The Toyota again tried to escape and manage to proceed to a gas station where it continued to be fired on, with some bullets penetrating the protective shields and injuring the passengers.
5. The assailants fled when police cars arrived and were later captured. Twelve Federal Police agents have been arrested.

What does this bizarre incident indicate?

So far both governments seem to be preparing some version of a case of “mistaken identity”. The NYT quotes anonymous US government officials as stating that “no evidence had emerged so far that the Americans were targeted because of their affiliation.”

However, both Reforma and La Jornada gathered detailed interviews from local evidence stating that anybody could see that the vehicle had diplomatic plates and that the agents comings and goings are common knowledge in the area. The possibility that the Federal Police did not know who they were shooting at is extremely low.

The next obvious question is: why did the Mexican police shoot the CIA agents?

Speculation has emerged that these police were in cahoots with an organized crime group. That’s pretty common here. Generally speaking, when organized crime shoots a U.S. agent, it’s to send a message, not just to get rid of somebody. They know that the action will have binational ramifications.

In this scenario, it’s hard to say what the potential message was. I´m not going to speculate on that until we know more.

The officers’ families have offered explanations that it was a simple mistake and/or that their relatives were fired on first. They were quoted as fearing a frame-up to “stay on the United States’s good side”.

If history is any indication, we may never know what really happened. One certainly gets the impression that this incident is not something either drug war ally wants to talk about. Compare the response of the U.S. government to the shooting of ICE agent Jaime Zapata on Feb. 15, 2011, when it immediately demanded justice and participated in the investigation of  The Mexican government also called that a case of mistaken identity, and probably will continue to claim all such cases are mistaken identity, since admitting that US agents are targeted could jeopardize the many programs that send U.S. agents to Mexico

It also indicates that U.S. funding to the Mexican federal police force, which has run in the millions since the Merida Initiative began in 2008, is funding a force that attacks U.S. agents, not to mention the massive evidence of violation of Mexicans’ human rights and attacks on their lives.

The NYT article notes the evident irony:

Through programs like the $1.6 billion Merida initiative, the United States has spent millions of dollars on training and equipping the federal police.

 This incident further derails the Washington argument that the police force is an acceptable option for funding the drug war since it is being “reformed”.

The conservative Wall Street Journal noted the “embarrassment” to the Mexican government of having its Federal Police Force go for the jugular of the hand that feeds it:

The incident has proved an embarrassment for the Mexican government, which receives millions of dollars annually in U.S. aid for its drug war and which has touted its federal police as the most professional force.

In addition to the embarrassment of Federal Police misbehavior, there is the issue of why CIA agents are training young Mexican Navy recruits to shoot their own people.

U.S. growing involvement in Mexico has raised the eyebrows and the ire of some members of Congress here in Mexico City. Since the ambush, they have called for a hearing and demanded that the Calderon administration give out information on the extent and the activities of U.S. agents.

This is a question that many of us have had for a long time now.

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

The caravan description reads:

“Led by the poet, Javier Sicilia, the caravan will meet with members of US society through dialogue and peaceful action, carrying proposals to shut off the flow of illegal arms to Mexico, supporting humane and health-oriented alternatives to the prohibition of drugs and demanding effective, non-violent security policies. It will also seek a humane immigration policy.“

The CIP Americas Program–along with some 100 partner organizations of migrants, churches, unions, students, NGOs and community members in the cities along the route–is helping to organize caravan events and give voice to the victims of the drug war. We will be accompanying the caravan on part of its long journey through the country and providing daily blogs, articles and interviews as events unfold.

A handful of U.S. companies that produce weapons and defense and intelligence equipment are raking in taxpayer dollars in government contracts for the drug war, while in Mexico more than 70,000 people have died since the war was launched in December 2006.

Today the face of the U.S. government in Mexico is the face of war. This face is reflected in the vast expansion of joint security operations and direct intervention in Mexico´s counter-narcotics planning and operations. Instead of schools and hospitals, our tax dollars support military helicopters and espionage systems.

The relationship between the two nations has degenerated into a seemingly endless war on drugs, The war is commanded from the north, where enforcing prohibition is considered more important than human lives, and fought in the south, where the long arm of enforcement has left 70,000 dead in the past six years.

Despite tragically negative results, the U.S. government has dismissed calls from citizens in both countries to end the war on drugs and the misguided Merida Initiative that supports it. Instead, we continue on a path that throws U.S. youth behind the bars of lucrative private prisons and feeds defense companies by perpetuating violent conflict in Mexico.

Family members of the thousands murdered, disappeared, attacked and displaced in Mexico’s drug war and their supporters will present a very different, human, face of binational relations. They will meet with families in the United States that have suffered senseless incarceration and violence as a result of criminalizing drugs, rather than supporting communities and individuals to manage the health and social threats posed by consumption and addiction.

Find out what organizations are planning in your community. You are needed to help out with organization of events and logistics for the peace caravan. Please plan to attend the events. Learn first-hand the human costs of the drug war and find out how to make change from your own community on up to the national and international levels.

Here is the caravan schedule. For more information on events in your community, see the caravan website. To volunteer for upcoming caravan events, please write us at: info@cipamericas.org

SCHEDULE:

San Diego, CA – Aug 12 SUN
Los Angeles, CA – Aug 13- Aug 14 MON/TUES
Phoenix, AZ – Aug 15 WED
Tucson, AZ – Aug 16 THURS
Las Cruces, NM – Aug 17 FRI
Albuquerque/Santa Fe, NM – Aug 18 SAT
Santa Fe, NM – Aug 19 SUN
El Paso, TX – Aug 21 TUES
Laredo, TX- Aug 22, WED
Harlingen/Brownsville, TX – Aug 23 THURS
McAllen/San Antonio, TX – Aug 24 FRI
Austin, TX – Aug 25 SAT
Houston, TX – Aug 26 SUN
New Orleans, LA – Aug 27 MON
Montgomery, AL – Aug 29 WED
Atlanta, GA – Aug 30 – 31 THURS/FRI
(Travel Night to Chicago, IL & Rest Day – Sept 2 SUN)
Chicago, IL – Sep 3-4 MON/TUES
Cleveland, OH -Sept 5 WED
New York, NY – Sept 6-7 THURS/FRI
Baltimore, MD – Sept 8-9 SAT/ SUN
Washington, D.C. – Sept 10-12 MON-WED – FINAL CITY

For More Information:

• Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity web site: http://www.caravanforpeace.org/caravan
• Global Exchange,  Co-Organizer of the Peace Caravan http://www.globalexchange.org/mexico/caravan
• Invitation to join the Peace Caravan here.
• Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity’s website (Spanish)
• Sign up to volunteer with the caravan by using this registration form.

Some English-language press on the Caravan so far:

Democracy Now! “Javier Sicilia Brings Peace Caravan to the U.S.to Condemn Deadly Drug War” Aug. 16.  http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/16/mexican_poet_activist_javier_sicilia_brings.  Also see: “Mexican Poet Javier Sicilia Condemns U.S. Role in We¡idening Drug Violence” May 11. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/11/stop_the_drug_war_mexican_poet

“Cross-country tour to point out the failure of the war on drugs”, Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 2012.  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0812-lopez-moms-20120812,0,6855876.column?page=1

“Mothers share their anguish at losses to Mexico’s violence”, Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 15, 2012. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0815-lopez-mexicomoms-20120814,0,218429.column

The Nation: Can the Caravan of Peace End the War on Drugs?

Los Angeles Times: Mexican activist, poet brings Caravan for Peace to U.S.

AFP: Drug war ‘peace caravan’ woos Hollywood

KPFA 94.1-FM in Berkeley: Victims of US/Mexico Drug War Lead Caravan for Peace

Contacts for Organizing:

1) Kirsten Moller: San Diego, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Jackson, Atlanta, Charlotte
kirsten@globalexchange.org, 415 255 7295

2) Louise Levayer: Tucson, El Paso, Brownsville/Harlingen/McAllen, San Antonio, Austin, Houston
louise.levayer@gmail.com, (415) 575 5531

3) Chelsea Brown: Albuquerque, Santa Fe, New York City, Baltimore
Chelsea.avril.brown@gmail.com, (415) 575 5531

4) Liz Sanchez: Cleveland, Phoenix, Montgomery, Chicago
lizsanchez0916@gmail.com, (415) 575 553

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

“We are the children of the ideals you couldn’t kill.”

A young woman carried the hand-lettered sign as she marched with tens of thousands of people in Mexico City last July 22. Twenty-something, with long black hair and jeans, her message captures the spirit and sense of history of Mexico’s new movement for real democracy. At the same time, it reveals the resentment that especially youth feel about the presidential elections and a new government that for them representsan era of manipulation and repression.

Weeks after Mexico’s presidential elections, thousands of people have turned out to protest the declared winner, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the imminent return to power of the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is slated to take office December 1, now faces increasing accusations of fraud, a legal demand to declare the elections invalid, and a youth movement that refuses to go away.

#IAm132

“Mexico, Without the PRI”, “Electoral Institute, You Coward—Correct the Elections!” and “Mexico Voted and Peña Didn’t Win!”–men and women chanted these slogans through downtown avenues in the latest demonstration, vowing that the politician best known for his hair-do and ties to old-style Mexican politics would never take office. Most of the marchers are university-age, but contingents of workers, neighborhood associations, and citizens of all ages take part.

Many support the opposition candidate and second-place finisher, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But the media spin that the entire movement is a contrivance of a poor loser falls flat when confronted with the actual messages and motives of the movement.

Mexico is seeing the birth of a movement for real democracy. It is led by a generation that wants to break through the cynicism of a nation accustomed to corruption and authoritarian rule. Its members challenge not just the election results, but the very definition of democracy.

The movement called “#IAm132” that arose in protest to Peña Nieto at a local university centers on the principle that democracy can’t be bought. Young people with no adult memory of living under the PRI have looked at their nation’s history and decided they don’t want to go back there.

The “#IAm132” movement–with the hashtag in its name marking its generational identity–has a broad platform that includes: democratization of the media to guarantee the right to information and freedom of expression; “secular, free, scientific, pluricultural, democratic, humanist, popular, critical, quality education”; change in the neoliberal economic model with less emphasis on the market and more state involvement; transformation of the security and justice model and withdrawal of the army from public security; participative democracy and autonomy; and health as a human right.

PRI’s Rocky Road Back to Power

Few people predicted Mexico’s post-electoral protests or the rapid rise of the youth-led movement against Peña Nieto. The PRI learned from its loss to Vicente Fox in 2000 and the convulsive post-electoral protests of 2006, when conservative candidate Felipe Calderon was declared the winner with the slimmest of margins and widespread accusations of fraud. It set out to avoid both scenarios, grooming its candidate years earlier to position him as the image of the “new PRI.”

The effort reportedly included secret deals with the major television stations for favorable coverage in the media dating back to 2009. Both the Mexican magazine Proceso and later The Guardian reported on these contracts, although the PRI denied the charges.

It also included rebuilding the political machine that served the party during its 71 years of uninterrupted rule over the country. That political machine suffered a debilitating blow with the election of Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000. The PRI not only lost the helm of a nation it had confidently controlled for years, it also lost its majority in the legislature and several state governorships to boot. It was a dramatic and ignominious fall from power, and the age of  “the dinosaurs”—as the PRI political elite is called—appeared to be over for good.

But at least one insider and numerous analysts claim that the PAN agreed to leave the PRI political machine in place in return for support for its reform proposals in the legislature and the continued dominance of a small and powerful economic elite. The PRI was able to rebuild without fear of criminal charges for past acts of corruption and repression among its ranks.

The 2012 elections proved that the machine has been well oiled and employs many of the same tactics used to guarantee electoral wins in the past. But the goal of building a solid margin of victory to assure legitimacy backfired due to citizen and some media monitoring of blatant abuses

A coalition of progressive parties filed a legal challenge on July 12 to declare the presidential election invalid due to violations of articles of the Mexican constitution that call for free and fair voting. The demand specifically cites exceeding campaign spending limits as the cause. The legal limit is set at the unlikely figure of $336,112,084.16 pesos—about $25.4 million dollars. The coalition says it has proof that the PRI-Green Party spent five times the allowed limit.

In the most potentially damaging aspect of the allegations, Lopez Obrador accused the PRI of laundering money through off-the-books campaign spending. The opposition has demanded an investigation into the possible use of public funds in PRI-governed areas and money from illicit sources, including organized crime. The use of pre-paid bankcards is a common form of money laundering. The PRI issued thousands of these cards from a bank called MONEX to voters in a presumed vote-buying operation. (One protest sign noted acidly, “Mexico’s elections were so clean, even the money was laundered”).

The legal challenge also cites evidence of buying off pollsters to create an impression that the election was in the bag. Many polling companies confidently reported double-digit leads for Peña Nieto,with up to an 18-point lead. The final count showed just over 6 points, with Peña Nieto at 38.21 percent, Lopez Obrador at 31.59 percent, and conservative candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota at 25.41 percent. Whether the discrepancy resulted from faulty methodology or giving the client what he wants has become the subject of daily conversation in Mexico.

US-Mexico Drug War Alliance

President Obama called Peña Nieto to congratulate him on his victory even before Mexican electoral authorities had declared the victory. The White house issued a readout of Obama’s call to Peña Nieto, heralding a continued partnership in “democracy, economic prosperity and security.”

The Obama administration’s rush to affirm support for the embattled candidate is not a sign of enthusiasm for the return of the PRI. The U.S. government clearly would have preferred another conservative government in Mexico. The National Action Party swung the door wide open to greater U.S. involvement in the country. Agencies including the DEA, ATF, CIA, and FBI as well as“retired” military personnel now participate in and operate Mexico’s disastrous internal security policies. Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs proved the perfect vehicle for breaking down resistance to U.S.  intervention and making huge inroads in its regional security plan, which includes integrating Mexico into its “regional security perimeter.”

But the Obama administration was eager to put the elections behindto get center-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador off the political stage as soon as possible. Lopez Obrador openly called for ending the drug warand “adopting a different strategy” during his final campaign speech.

Ignoring the post-electoral conflicts already brewing south of the border, the White House congratulated the candidate and the Mexican people for having “demonstrated their commitment to democratic values through a free, fair, and transparent election process.”But well before Lopez Obrador filed the legal challenge, evidence of vote buying had surfaced and the “Iam132” movement and others were expressing accusations of fraud.

When asked by a reporter on July 9 if the State Department still maintained that the elections were “transparent,” spokesperson Patrick Ventrell dodged the question, stating only that “we welcome the electoral authority’s announcement of the final results, and obviously we look forward to working with President-elect Mr. Pena Nieto.”

The administration accepted Peña Nieto when polls showed a significant lead and hurriedly arranged meetings with its soon-to-be new ally well before the elections. The Pentagon-driven Mexico policy requires a willing partner in the drug war. Mexican army troops are now stationed in strategic locations throughout the country, ostensibly to stop the flow of illegal drugs and capture drug kingpins. They have repeatedly acted to repress human rights defenders and subdue communities protesting the loss of natural resource control or army presence. The armed forces act as a form of social control, while army officials have been accused of being in cahoots with organized crime in several cases.

Continuing the drug war is at the top of the U.S. binational agenda. Congress has sustained it through consistent funding of the Merida Initiative since the Bush plan passed in 2008. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just recommended four more years and a billion more U.S. taxpayer dollars, despite the fact that the joint strategy has resulted in 60,000 fatalities in Mexico and no measurable decrease in the flow of illicit drugs to the U.S.

Pena Nieto stated, “Without a doubt, I am committed to having an intense, close relationship of effective collaboration measured by results,” alleviating fears that the former nationalist party would distance itself from the new military/police alliance with its powerful neighbor. He has announced the appointment of a former chief of Colombia National Police, General Oscar Naranjo, as his top security adviser before the elections. Naranjo is a key player in Colombian security policy and very close to the U.S. security establishment.

There are four months until the inauguration. Mexico’s long lame-duck period will be rife with protests. The IAm132 movement joined with other grassroots organizations in mid-July to lay out a series of mobilizations tied to the date the electoral authorities must ratify electoral results (September 6), inauguration (December 1), and beyond.

In questioning the role of media monopolies, publicity and public image, vote buying, campaign spending, and political operators, Mexico’s new movement is raising serious questions about electoral democracy. The questions don’t only apply to Mexico–a nation emerging from and perhaps returning to authoritarian government. They also have much relevance to the United States as it heads toward presidential elections in November.

Photos: Clayton Conn, Alfredo Acedo

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

Photo: Clayton Conn

Mexicans hit the streets again on Sunday, in the third mass demonstration against the apparent president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, in the three weeks since the elections. After months of demonstrations, Mexico’s movement to reject the return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
shows no signs of fading away.

The July 22 “National March Against the Imposition” began at the presidential residence and arrived shortly after noon at Mexico City’s Angel of Independence. Hundreds of people waited to join at the gold-tipped monument, swelling the ranks as students, unions, and citizens moved on to the central plaza.

At the final destination, tens of thousands poured into the square. They marched in clumps and converged from different routes, making it impossible to grasp the full dimension of the march at any given moment. But what the mobilization lacked in route planning, it made up for in energy, indignation and creativity.

This was about the fifth or sixth march against the PRI and its candidate that I’ve observed first-hand.  I wanted to check out two questions at this one: 1) what difference, if any, the coalition of organizations forged during the National Convention July 14-15 made and 2) what the main demands are, as election day fades into history and evidence of foul play mounts. I also wanted to see if accusations that the student-led movement is controlled by the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) had any substance behind them.

Organizations like the electricians union (SME) and the democratic current of the teachers’ union (CNTE) that took part in the planning meeting in the town of Atenco turned out, although not in huge  numbers. The march was called just a week after the accords in Atenco and most organizations have to go through a series of assemblies to make decisions. It may take longer to really assess the impact of the formal incorporation of other sectors into the movement against Peña Nieto and the PRI.

Some unions and universities walked in contingents but for the most part, the march–unlike most Mexico marches–was made up of citizens with home-made signs who marched without visible organizations. Most were young, some were older, including veterans of past movements. The predominance of seemingly unaffiliated people added to the sense of spontaneity of the demonstration, but also to questions about its longer term direction and longevity.

National March Against the Imposition
Since the elections and accusations of fraud, vote-buying and coercion, the marches against the PRI have focused more on the electoral process. “Imposition” refers to the protesters’ belief that Peña Nieto was imposed on voters through a series of manipulations and falsifications that violated electoral laws and the popular will. Recent demonstrations called by the student group “Iam132″ continue to before the elections denounced the candidate, the way the highly concentrated mass media openly promoted his candidacy and the possible return of the PRI. Most of the students who make up the movement have no real memory of living under a PRI government, since the conservative National Action Party (PAN) has held the presidency for the past twelve years. One young woman carried a sign that read, “We are the children of the ideals you never succeeded in killing”.

We also demand the a full explanation of the physical and legal situation of the 24 young people arrested–including two minors, identified in the #YoSoy132 movement, who were arbitrarily imprisoned by state government officials in Oaxaca City. We call on the competent authorities to investigate the cases and clear their names. We request that the officials involved in the various violation of human rights be sanctioned for their acts.

We repudiate the unjustified or disproportionate use of force, arbitrary arrest, torture, just to mention a few, repression that denies freedom of expression and the free manifestation of ideas, as well as abuse of power, threats and harassment against members of social movements. We therefore demand these cases be cleared up and public officials brought to justice and that state and federal authorities prosecute cases of complaints related to these events.

 The violent and arbitrary response by police in these cities could be an ominous sign. The movement continues to insist on peaceful and non-confrontational tactics as it moves into a series of actions decided at the National Convention. The July 22 march was the first of those actions It showed that the movement still has a great ability to draw people into the streets for organized protests– even weeks after elections that the media and political elite attempted to portray as an unassailable victory– and among those protestors the rejection of the PRI candidate runs as strong as ever.

As for the second question–what are longer term strategies, beyond the action plan from here to Dec. 1–in all the enthusiasm of the march, I couldn’t discern any. The people I talked to said for now, the focus is on consolidating the movement and making its voice here from now to the inauguration.

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

• The human rights defender Margarita Martínez reports on the situation of violence against women human rights defenders and journalists in Mexico before the CEDAW Committee. 
• Martínez has been tortured and repeatedly attacked for her work,  and despite protective measures mandated by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, continuous threats have forced her family to flee Chiapas.  
• In Latin America, Mexico has the highest number of attacks against journalists and the second highest number against women human rights defenders.

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

Web page: www.cipamericas.org

Facebook: CIP Americas Program

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