Javier Sicilia

July 12, 2011
“For some,” writes Javier Sicilia, responding to critics within his own fledgling movement, “to dialogue is to capitulate.” If you haven’t humiliated your adversary, you have failed. But to change the dynamic of the violence that has beset the country over, especially, the past five years, he argues, it is necessary to change the discourse of violence. “Since March 28,” he writes, “when the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity began its work, there began a change in the language of war and pain.”
June 28, 2011
Last Thursday, President Felipe Calderón held a highly publicized encounter with several victims of the extreme violence that has accompanied his ongoing war against drug trafficking and organized crime. The victims didn’t succeed in getting Calderón to apologize for the inordinate number of deaths and disappearances that have occurred on his drug-war watch, but they did get the president to listen to tales of immense suffering.  
June 14, 2011
Last weekend, while in California, Mexico’s free-trading, conservative president, Felipe Calderón identified some of his principal political enemies: U.S. Arms Dealers, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Mexican pacifists. He named no names, but the identities were clear. He was invited to Palo Alto to deliver Sunday’s commencement address at Stanford University. A portion of his speech included a sharp, campaign-style attack on Mexico’s once, but no longer dominant PRI.
June 11, 2011
On June 10, a new movement was born in Mexico. A peace caravan of hundreds of people from all over the country arrived to the border city of Ciudad Juárez to sign a national social pact with the goal of ending the militarized drug war in Mexico. This drug war has killed approximately 40,000 people since Mexican president Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006. This pact was appropriately signed in brutalized Ciudad Juárez, an epicenter of drug war-related violence, where 7,000 of these killings have taken place.

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