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| Movement for Peace calls for end of US arms trade and drug war Photo: Eduardo Miranda |
Proceso: Javier Sicilia*
Mexico City - Mexico--it is already a terrible cliche--has more than 70,000 killed and about 30,000 disappeared in less than seven years, according to official data. Beginning with the massacre in Newtown [CT] in December of 2012, which killed twenty children, the United States reports 2,657 murders to the present date. In one way or another, all have been victims of guns, many of them involve assault weapons, sold legally and illegally in the United States.
These are just numbers, statistics that create a perception far from reality, as if we were to look at a model that says nothing about the horror. In order to understand, you have to hear the story of the victims, what we see every night and what wakens us with a start. For two years now, in my loneliness I keep looking for my Juanelo and his six friends subdued by gunmen. They are alone in front of them, terrified. They insult them, beat them with the butts of their guns and lock them in a warehouse. Their fear is growing. They argue, ask, beg.
But those guys feel safe behind the arrogance of their weapons and beat them again. They humiliate them more, strip them, spit on them, torture them, humiliate them. They have slowly been destroying their humanity, filling them with animal terror. My Juanelo has seen his friends die by suffocation in plastic bags--those imbeciles don't want to use their weapons to avoid calling attention. It's his turn.
He breathes with difficulty, with a lust for life that cannot be reached. There is no plea, there is no compassion, there is no terror or love that manages to contain the gangrene of the soul that--the same as they have done with his friends--they throw over him, in the terror of his solitude and of his suffocation he wonders why they are doing this.
Along with these unbearable images that haunt me every night, across these two years I have not stopped listening to other stories where boys naked and unarmed have been patiently destroyed, mutilated, tortured and then killed by plastic bags, with bursts of AK 47 or a shot in the neck, by armed beings whose features resemble ours. And faced with each one of these stories of victims ..., our heads spin, the anguish chokes the soul and we ask ourselves, how is it possible?
Nevertheless, it is; it is in this moment as I write these lines.The reasons--if there are reasons for doing something like that--are incomprehensible. But there is one that paralyzes us. These men can do what they do, because others, also like us, they are good parents, like us, they have good children, just like our [children] that they took by force, but these others decided in the name of money and for their own imbecilic reasons to manufacture weapons, market them, sell them to the murderers and sleep in peace. Because other men who guard the State and who say they protect our security, they decided, for the same reasons and having recourse to unjust laws, that what the arms manufacturers and arms dealers do is okay.
But it is not. No weapon, no commercial interest, no ideological justification, such as that protected by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, no fight against drugs that in Mexico exponentially feeds the arms trade and crime--nothing is worth this atrocious reality. It is necessary that these men know that a single hair of these young men and of these children murdered and disappeared by the miserable force of arms, that a single hair of these young men and these children who are in danger of being destroyed by the technological arrogance of the arms industry, that one of the anxieties of parents searching for their children is that gunmen have taken them, that one night spent facing the death of our children is more important for Mexico and for the United States than the millions of men and women with a smile on their lips who defend the universe of arms and the war against substances that should be viewed, not as a matter of national security, but as a health problem regulated and controlled by the State.
Stopping the guns and changing the way the drug problem is viewed by looking at the evidence of horror rather than at statistics [must be] the priority of the meeting in May to be held between Barack Obama and Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico. It must be the basis for the bilateral agenda, but it is also the responsibility of citizens in both countries. If we don't exert pressure to make it so, if we leave it only to the commercial and political interests--before which the States have knelt to make them justify the crime--so that they may speak through the mouths of our leaders, surrounded as always by clouds of photographers and headlines, then we will all have the face of the murderers.
Then we, those who cannot sleep now because we know the horror and have no heart to accept it, we will continue struggling against the weak ones who find [our message] monotonous, in order to change the fate that democracies reserve for human beings. ... Spanish original