On August 12, where the wall between Mexico and the U.S. meets the Pacific Ocean, acclaimed Mexican poet Javier Sicilia and busloads of people who are fed up with the drug war launched the Caravan for Peace. Over the next several weeks, the Caravan will travel to 25 different U.S. cities with the goal of starting a serious national dialogue about the failure of drug prohibition.
Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered by drug traffickers in 2011, described the drug war this way:
"This war's failure is devastating: the 23 million American drug consumers are far from diminishing but increasing instead; in the past 5 years, Mexico has accumulated almost 70 thousand dead, more than 20 thousand missing people, more than 250 thousand have been displaced, along with hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans, and these figures keep rising. The American gun manufacturers arm the organized crime through illegal trade, while the Mérida Initiative legally arms the Mexican army, fostering war. The American jails imprison millions of human beings because of drug consumption. The immigrants are criminalized on this side of the border and extorted or made to disappear on the other side; the temptation to militarize using the police regime emerges on both sides, while setting a deep crisis for democracy and undermining the greatness of open societies."
Produced by Alex Manning and Paul Feine.
