Massive demonstrations in Mexico: End the US-led drug war

[the_future_modernes]

And This Is What History Looks Like in Mexico

A fast moving series of events that began on March 28 have converged to usher Mexico into its very own "Arab spring." And it began just outside "the City of Eternal Spring," Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos, about an hour south of Mexico City. Narco News has been covering these events for the past week (sadly, we are so far the only English-language media to do so at each step of the story, even as it has huge consequences for United States drug policy not only in Mexico but throughout the world and at home). On that date, in the town of Temixco, seven young men were assassinated. These were kids with jobs, who went to school, model kids, not criminals. And one of those kids, Juan Francisco Silvia, was the son of a nationally respected journalist and poet, Javier Sicilia, of Cuernavaca.

In a week, the soft spoken, increasingly beloved, intellectual has become the national vessel through which millions of voices now demand: End the war on drugs.

We translated Javier's Open Letter to Mexico's Politicians and Criminals this week, and penned what is our third editorial in eleven years to provide you with context and background to understand the magnitude of what he has unearthed. Yesterday we translated his statements calling for the legalization of drugs to restore peace and dignity to Mexico, and then we headed out to report the marches that this increasingly and deservedly beloved man called for to happen only days ago. We had reporters with Sicilia in his city of Cuernavaca, in Mexico City, and correspondents in numerous other Mexican and international locations, and over the course of the day I will be adding photos and more information about what happened to this page as updates.

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Narcoviolence in Mexico: Eight Theses and Many Questions

Source: La Jornada (Independent Mexican newspaper)

Originally published on January 15, 2011

Translated by Sandy Juarez and Jason Wallach

More than three years ago, the man who directs the destinies of our nation from Los Pinos declared war against the Mexican drug cartels. Since then, we Mexicans have given --according to official statistics-- more than 31,000 lives to the war, with countless injured. Several large cities (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Monterrey, Tampico, Morelia, Culiacan, Mazatlan) live in fear and in virtual states of siege. Some regions have become abandoned, rural areas are a no man's land, federal highways impassable. Seventeen states of the Republic are living crises of epic insecurity. Thousands of complaints have been lodged to human rights commissions (and those are the ones that are made public, as fear [of reporting violations] prevents us from knowing more than the tip of the iceberg) for rape, kidnapping, blackmail, illegal raids, robberies and all kinds of abuse produced by the police forces, the Army and to a lesser extent, the Navy. Urban neighborhoods and industrial areas are no longer visited by tax assessors or health inspectors, because the drug cartels are the State.

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Mexico: Subcomandante Marcos on President Calderon's 'War from above'

During the final week of an eventful February in the Middle East and North Africa, many on Twitter have taken to tweeting and re-tweeting an epigrammatic quotation attributed to the iconic spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Subcomandante Marcos.

Its English translation, circulated by @EagleIreports, @culturatist, @paperstargirl and many others, reads: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.” The applicability to circumstances in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia and around the region is all but self-evident. In Mexico, the Subcomandante has come to the forefront of netizen's discussions with the recent publication of a letter about the country's current problem with organized, drug related crime.

Subcomandante Marcos

Those seeking a refresher course on Marcos and his role in the Zapatista insurgency and ongoing campaign for human rights for the indigenous peoples of southeastern Mexico need only watch a recent interview with Marcos on the history of Zapatismo's long struggle for dignity in the name of this forgotten segment of Mexican society.

Just as readers around the globe grasp the humor and urgency in “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution,” they now respond with fresh eyes and ears to Marcos' declaration in the interview that “History is a battleground in this war.”

Meanwhile, on February 14, the website Enlace Zapatista [es], the online arm of theEZLN, opened another front with the publication of “Sobre las Guerras.” This was translated overnight byblogger Kristin Bricker as: “About the Wars: A Fragment of the First Letter from Subcomandante Marcos to Don Luis Villoro, beginning the correspondence about Ethics and Politics.” The text, dated January-February 2011, is part 2 of 4 which will appear in the next issue of Rebeldiamagazine” (forthcoming at the time of this posting).

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Mexico: New (Dis)Agreement on Reporting Violence

On March 24, most of the biggest Mexican media outlets signed the“Agreement to Cover Violence in Mexico,” an agreement that unifies the editorial criteria to cover and report news related to violence generated by the war waged against drugs cartels in Mexico since 2006.

More than 700 organizations signed and backed the accord [es], but important media outlets like Reforma, La Jornada, Proceso and MVS Noticias did not.

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