Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice

footerBlog60,000 killed, 10,000 disappeared and 160,000 displaced.

This is the ongoing tragedy that has been wrought upon the Mexican people in the few short years since Felipe Calderón declared a “war on cartels” in December, 2006.

Javier Sicilia, the famed Mexican poet, stopped writing poetry after his son was gunned down in Cuernavaca in March, 2011. On the day his son died he wrote one final verse before putting down his pen: “the world is not worthy of words, they have been suffocated from the inside, just as they suffocated you.”

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CC photo by Caravan4Peace

Since then he has been taking to the streets of Mexico, with hundreds of thousands of other citizens in a dramatic plea to the drug cartels and the government to stop the violence that has been tearing apart their country. Sicilia, as he is known in Mexico, led two Caravans for Peace – one from Cuernavaca to Mexico City and the other through the north of Mexico, where the violence has been beyond comprehension.

On August 12th, Sicilia led close to a hundred victims of the drug war in Mexico across the border from Tijuana to San Diego to begin a month-long Caravan for Peace across the southern and north eastern US. The overarching message of the Caravan for Peace is that the war on drugs continues to devastate his country and is the result of drug policies initiated in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. CDPC will be joining the Caravan for Peace in Baltimore, Maryland on September 9th as it stops to hold a Town Hall Meeting on drug policy that will look at how all three countries have much to gain by considering alternatives to a failed war on drugs.

Follow our blog in the coming weeks to read more about the Caravan for Peace, Javier Sicilia, and Canada’s relationship to Mexico’s drug war.

About Donald MacPherson

Donald MacPherson is the Executive Director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and one of Canada’s leading figures in drug policy. In 2000 he published Vancouver’s groundbreaking Four Pillars Drug Strategy that precipitated a broad public discussion on issues related to addiction.