Tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on Zócalo in Mexico City on Sunday, demanding an end to the wave of violence in which up to 40,000 people have been murdered in the past four and a half years.
Marching on the iconic square, protesters called for an immediate halt to the Calderón government’s policy of fighting fire with fire as the country’s ongoing “war on drug trafficking” shows no signs of relenting.
One of the event’s principal organisers was the poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered in brutal circumstances along with five companions, some exhibiting signs of torture, in March.
Thousands had marched the 50 miles from Cuernavaca, the site of Juan Francisco Sicilia’s killing, to the centre of Mexico’s gargantuan capital in complete silence, the procession gaining numbers along the way.
Since coming to power in an election marred by evidence of widespread electoral fraud in 2006, President Felipe Calderón has deployed about 50,000 troops to take on the armed cartels, which make their money by trafficking narcotics towards and into the United States.
As rival gangs compete for trade routes and regional supremacy, innocent people are invariably caught in the crossfire.
Killing fields
The fallout has been catastrophic. Since Calderón’s disputed election, tens of thousands of Mexicans have paid with their lives as the conflict has spun out of control, turning the Mexican side of the border shared with the United States into one of the most dangerous regions on the planet.
Ciudad Juárez, population 1.3 million, sits a short distance over the frontier from El Paso, Texas, and has witnessed more than 600 murders since January – many of them women, and 50 claiming the lives of children under the age of 13. Three thousand people were murdered in the municipality in 2010.
Stories that would remain etched in the public consciousness for years in Britain disappear from the headlines in days in Mexico as news of fresh atrocities consigns them to the history books. In April, several mass graves, containing more than a hundred bodies in total, were found in the northern state of Tamaulipas.
Last August the corpses of 72 mostly central American migrants en route to the United States who had turned down offers to work for the potent Los Zetas cartel had been found in the same state.
Such incidents have become routine. The effect of the prolonged instability on business and tourism has been disastrous.
No more war
The government, turning a blind eye to the vociferous protestations of those who arrived in the capital on Sunday after several days’ marching, insists it has played no role whatsoever in escalating the insecurity that today plagues much of the country.
“The military, the navy and the federal police do not generate violence,” retorted an official government communiqué. “The federal government shares with its citizens the aspiration of making Mexico a safe country with opportunities for development for all.”
For at least one former president, however, the war on drugs will never be won. Felipe Calderón’s immediate predecessor, Vicente Fox, caused consternation last year when he pointed to the elephant in the room: the profit margins available to cartels because of the illegal status of marijuana and other illicit substances.
“What I am proposing is legalisation, so that the people running the trade are businessmen instead of criminals . . . They would pay taxes and this would generate jobs,” said Fox, who, like Calderón, is a staunch conservative from the National Action Party.
The former president pointed out that, by every statistical measure, the war against the drug gangs has been an abject failure. “After four years of the war on trafficking in Mexico, the cartels are exporting more drugs, killing more people and getting richer than ever . . .
“Prohibition of alcohol in the United States failed. It just provoked violence and criminality until it was abandoned,” Fox said.
President Calderón said he was against the proposal, but expressed a desire to see a national debate on the matter. He said that until the US alters its policy towards illegal substances, Mexico is in no position to do so: “This country would become a paradise for all the world’s criminals.”
Content from our partners
Related
