The war on drugs is not a metaphor in Mexico:
for four years the Mexican Army has fought drug traffickers
in the streets.
With no success and 40,000 dead, many of them collateral damage.
The people have had it with that:
No mas Guerra de las Drogas!
Al Giordano wrote 7 April 2011,
And This Is What History Looks Like in Mexico
Yesterday, multitudes took to the streets in more than 40 Mexican cities –
and in protests by Mexicans and their friends at consulates and embassies
in Europe, North America and South America – to demand an end to the
violence wrought by the US-imposed “war on drugs.”
What? You haven’t heard about this? Or if you have heard something about
it, did you know that it is the biggest news story in the Mexican media,
on the front page of virtually every daily newspaper in the country?
A sea change has occurred in Mexican public opinion. The people have
turned definitively against the use of the Mexican Army to combat against
drug traffickers. The cry from every city square yesterday was for the
Army to return to its barracks and go back to doing the job it was formed
to do; protect Mexico from foreign invasion and provide human aid relief
in case of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Since
President Felipe Calderón unleashed the Armed Forces, four years ago,
to combat drug trafficking organizations, the violence between it
and the competing narco organizations has led to a daily body count,
widespread human rights abuses against civilians, and more than 40,000
deaths, so many of them of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire
and used by all sides in the armed conflict that still has no winners,
that never will have any winner.
What woke up the people of Mexico, or, rather, who?
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50,000 people marched in Cuernavaca 6 April 2011 to the gates
of a military base, where the usual military guards were nowhere to be seen.
Then a poet, whose son had recently been killed by the drug war,
climbed up and said:
