Mexican activist to take ‘peace caravan’ to US

Mexico City: Mexican peace activist Javier Sicilia is launching a “caravan for peace” across the US in a month-long campaign from Sunday to protest the two countries’ brutal drug war.

“We are going to explain to the North American population that behind their addicts, behind this war declared by their government, behind their weapons, there are our dead, our disappeared and a crisis for democracy,” Sicilia told reporters.

Sicilia has emerged as the face of the protest movement against President Felipe Calderon’s “imbecilic war” on drugs since his son and six others were found killed and tortured last year in an incident blamed on a local gang.

The caravan, which will pass through 25 major cities, will depart from the Mexican border city of Tijuana with about 250 participants and end in Washington on September 10.

Participants will march from San Diego, heading east along the US-Mexico border for over 8,000 kilometres, with stops in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, El Paso, Houston, Montgomery, New Orleans, Chicago and New York.

“If in this war that brings such darkness Mexico has a grave responsibility, so too does the United States,” Sicilia wrote in a column in The Huffington Post online newspaper.

“To ‘protect’ the twenty-three million drug users in the United States, we’ve waged a war that has destroyed Colombia and that now destroys Mexico, Central America and will eventually destroy the United States itself.”

Sicilia, a poet and journalist, said the caravan’s participants will serve as “citizen-diplomats” to “reach out to you in the United States and seek your help in building a true, bi-national movement for peace and justice.”

“Let us work together as neighbours to bring an end to the drug war.”

In June 2011, Sicilia’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity organised a protest caravan linking Mexico City to the border town of Ciudad Juarez, considered the most violent city in Mexico.

More than 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since late 2006, when Calderon ordered the military to take the lead in a war against the country’s powerful drug cartels.