CROSSING BORDERS

Americans Need to Join in a 'Mad As Hell' Movement Protesting the
Cartels and Drug Violence in Mexico.

Last year I visited a friend of mine, journalist Raul Silva, in a
working-class neighborhood of Cuernavaca. A popular destination for
tourists and students of Spanish, the city, about 60 miles south of
the Mexican capital, was on edge. Only a few weeks before, a drug
gang had audaciously displayed its power, issuing a curfew one Friday
night, warning that anyone out after 8 p.m. might be "mistaken" as an
enemy and killed. A terrified public huddled indoors, and although no
serious violence occurred, the incident left a deep scar.

Raul and I spoke for hours, and I realized too late that I faced a
taxi ride on a dark two-lane road to return to my wife and children
in a nearby town. I asked Raul if he thought it was safe. "You should
be OK," he said, without much assurance in his voice.

It was a 30-minute ride with a gregarious cabbie who lectured me
about (what else?) la guerra del narco, the drug war. "They" were all
implicated, he told me, the cartel bosses and the mules, of course,
but also the business elites, the governments, the addicts - on both
sides of the border. In other words, there was no border.

There was a long stretch on that ride during which we passed not a
single car. I asked the cabbie if he was worried. Not exactly; in
Spanish, he invoked the classic fatalism: "When your time's up, it's
up." I made it back to my family without incident.

A year later the road is dark as ever. Nearly 300 bodies were
discovered in April in narcofosas, mass graves of victims of the
cartels. For Mexicans on both sides of the border, the Cinco de Mayo
celebration, like last year's centennial of the revolution and
bicentennial of independence, has been overshadowed by the violence.

And yet an unlikely spark of hope has been lighted in recent weeks,
and it began with the death of a poet's child. Javier Sicilia, of
Cuernavaca, a well-known author and regular columnist for Mexico's
leading political weekly Proceso, penned an anguished manifesto after
his son, Juan Francisco, and several of Juan Francisco's friends were
killed in a narco-related crime (the victims had no known connection
to the drug trade). Sicilia's open letter is as lucid as it is
piercing, a cry in the desert and righteous denunciation.

"What I want to tell you today about those mutilated lives," wrote
Sicilia of his son and by extension all victims of the drug violence,
"about that suffering, about the indignation that these deaths has
provoked, is simply that we have had enough."

That italicized final phrase is an imperfect translation of the
highly colloquial "estamos hasta la madre," which invokes "mother,"
as Mexicans often do in Spanish, in an elastic and metaphorical way.
We are up to our "mother" in this suffering; we can take it no more;
it has violated the most profound and sacred spaces of our spirit.
The phrase becomes a mantra in Sicilia's letter.

"Estamos hasta la madre," he addressed the politicians, "with your
struggle for power that has torn apart the fabric of the nation," and
likewise to the cartels, "with your violence, loss of honor, cruelty,
your senselessness."

Sicilia's words galvanized the public and gave Mexicans a real-life,
mad-as-hell "Network" moment. "Estamos hasta la madre" appeared on
signs held up by grandmothers and children in protest marches
nationwide, on countless Facebook pages, on the lips of people across
all social strata. On Cinco de Mayo, Sicilia led several hundred
protesters out of Cuernavaca on a march scheduled to arrive in Mexico
City today, just one in a weekend of promised demonstrations.

Skeptics wonder exactly how a simple plea for peace and justice can
stop the cycle of violence and impunity. But Sicilia is facing death
and despair the only way he knows how, with the poetry of protest.

What is missing in all of this is us - I mean those of us on this
side of the border who don't live in immigrant neighborhoods. (There,
there is already great distress, the perennial longing for the
homeland becomes tragically poignant. There is no homeland to return
to; the risk in too many cases is too great.)

Among the broader American public there has been no "Network" moment,
no eloquent call to action. The drug war is perceived as Mexico's,
not ours, never mind that the weapons doing the bloodletting are in
great part supplied by the United States - and not just through
private dealers. We are implicated in the violence through the Merida
Initiative, a U.S.-led program that provided $750 million in
technical support in 2009 and 2010 for the Mexican military, which
promotes itself as above the corruption of state and local police but
which has had thousands of human rights complaints logged against it,
according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission.

And of course Americans have a more personal connection with the
"Mexican" drug war. There is no innocent recreational drug use. Most
of the cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine consumed in the United
States is produced in or transported through Mexico. Almost all the
blood spilled in the war has been in Mexico, but perhaps our
bloodshed is the devastation experienced by addicts, their families
and their communities.

I am years clean, long finished with the cocaine that I was once
addicted to, but I cannot claim that my hands are clean. I was part
of a global market, played my role as a consumer, entered the vast
constellation of relationships that pushes and pulls drugs, money and
guns across the border - and takes its toll on both sides.

There must be a language of "we" in this war because we are all its
victims and victimizers. Let us listen to Javier Sicilia: "Estamos
hasta la madre." Or we should be - all of us.