The Caravan for Peace Begins a Long Ride Across the USA

By Fred Rosen

 North American Congress on Latin America - NACLA 
 August 20,  2012

 http://www.nacla.org/blog/2012/8/20/caravan-peace-begins-long-ride-across-usa

 On August 12th, with activist-poet Javier Sicilia providing
 the leadership, the inspiration, and the poetry, the anti-
 Drug War, anti-militarization Caravan for Peace With Justice
 and Dignity kicked off its one-month, 6,000-mile journey
 across the United States.

 Riding from San Diego to Washington, D.C., the Caravan seeks
 to educate and confront Americans about the terrible
 violence besetting Mexico - and perhaps to recruit those who
 are convinced and inspired to a U.S. offshoot of Mexico's
 Movement for Peace. The journey will take the group,
 composed of Mexican and U.S. citizens, with a sizable
 contingent of relatives of the murdered and disappeared,
 along the entire U.S. border with Mexico, and further east
 to Atlanta and nearby Fort Benning. Readers will remember
 Fort Benning as the home of the infamous School of the
 Americas, training ground of Latin American dictatorships -
 and of some of most brutal tyrants of the last century.

 From Atlanta, the Caravan will turn north, reaching Chicago
 - destination of a large number of Mexican immigrants - on
 the evening of September 2, where it will stay until the
 4th. It will then head to New York for two days of meetings
 and demonstrations (September 6 and 7) and finally to
 Washington, D.C. for a closing demonstration/ceremony and
 press conference on September 12. All told, the Caravan will
 have stopover points in 27 U.S. cities.

 Led by Sicilia, who was presented with NACLA's La Lucha
 Sigue Award last May, the Caravan seeks to raise U.S.
 awareness of the human toll the increasingly violent Drug
 War is taking in Mexico - with somewhere near 70,000 deaths
 and countless kidnappings, disappearances, and acts of
 extortion over the past six years. In pursuit of that
 awareness, the Caravan wants to highlight the many ways the
 United States (public institutions and private actors alike)
 aids and abets the Mexican horror: promotion of, and aid for
 the militarized Drug War; the ease of access to the cross-
 border arms trade; the widespread practice of money
 laundering; and the enormous U.S. demand for illicit drugs.
 The Caravan has been raising the issue of the "inhumane"
 U.S. immigration policy as well. It explicitly wants to
 place these questions on the political agenda during the
 run-up to the U.S. elections, when people are presumably
 paying attention to politics and policy.

 Sicilia is the founder of the Movement for Peace With
 Justice and Dignity, and the principal spokesperson for the
 Caravan's agenda. His public talks reflect a fairly
 sophisticated knowledge of his audience, taking his text
 from such diverse Americans as Benjamin Franklin ("there
 never was a good war or a bad peace") and Tom Paine ("only
 an army of principles can penetrate where an army of
 soldiers cannot"), to Ezra Pound ("...with usura, sin
 against nature/ is thy bread ever more of stale rags/ is thy
 bread dry as paper....") and Bob Dylan ("sometimes my burden
 seems more than I can bear/ it's not dark yet, but it's
 getting there"). No Padre Hidalgo or Pancho Villa here.

 The use of Pound may seem a little out of place in this
 movement, but here's how Sicilia brings it home: "Because of
 usury - this immense search of profit at any cost - the
 usury of this war against drugs, of guns, of those banks and
 their money laundering, this usury coming from the United
 States, that has encysted in Mexico and spreads out like
 gangrene throughout the American continent and the world,
 that has overwhelmed us with pain, misery, death, and the
 despise of what is human and for the earth." A powerful
 gloss on the coyuntura, this.

 On presenting Sicilia with the La Lucha Sigue award three
 months ago, NACLA described his work and his presence in the
 following way:

 "Sicilia's activism and discourse have increasingly taken on
 the character and language of nonviolent resistance. To
 change the dynamic of the violence that has beset the
 country, he argues, it is necessary to change the discourse
 of violence. Such a change, he has written, must reflect the
 belief system of militant nonviolence - the commitment to
 face power with resistance and sacrifice, and the
 willingness to publicly absorb oppression in order to end
 it."

 This is the guiding vision of the Caravan.

 [Fred Rosen is a writer and reporter based in Mexico City.
 He has been a regular correspondent and/or columnist for a
 number of publications, including NACLA Report on the
 Americas, El Financiero International, Mexican Labor News
 and Analysis, and the Mexico edition of The Miami Herald.]

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