June 3, September 10, August 21, Riding from San Diego to Washington, D. August 13, February 21, As we have written here before, it is not likely that the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity MPJD , the small but persistent pacifist movement organized by the Mexican poet, essayist and nonviolent activist, Javier Sicilia, will bring a genuine internal peace to Mexico any time soon, but its growing visibility and its persistence in the face of threats and smug dismissals from all sides is encouraging.
February 13, It's a country out of control — people are dying everywhere, the whole time … and many are young, like Juan, on the threshold of their lives. Like many parents in Mexico, Javier had long worried about his son's safety. Instead, Juan's body was discovered bound and gagged near the family's home in Cuernavaca, an hour's drive from Mexico City.
Javier was at a conference in the Philippines at the time; when he heard the news, he says, he sat and smoked an entire packet of cigarettes. By the time he stubbed out the last one, he had made a decision: he would ensure that Juan's death would be the springboard for a people's protest against the drugs violence. After Juan's funeral — at which he read his final poem — Javier told his friends, "Poetry doesn't exist in me any more.
But he had no intention of remaining silent. Instead, he founded a movement, with the slogan: "Enough is enough. That's why I feel I must do this — because I can be a voice, and the situation is now so bad that it demands action.
It's not only an end to the violence itself that's needed, he says — what is also shocking is the total disrespect for the needs and rights of those who are bereaved.
But that's not what normally happens … it only happened to us because of who I am. It is a country that is out of control, and things cannot go on this way. It is part of his personality, and what gives him this role of leader and the political power that he has at this moment.
He is a man who historic necessity put in a new place to act using his talents. This has to last. Sylvia insists that Javier already had his political talent. He has always been very diplomatic, and a great communicator. And now he is a national personality, but this was not a flower that bloomed in just one day.
She is an architect and a poet who also lost a daughter. The both of them have lost children. He has stopped writing poetry because the world is not worthy of the word, and the same pain is in the heart and the daily life of the Mexican people.
Javier has decided to turn his grief into action and put all his indignation and pain at the service of the demand for change. His way of speaking, of being, of looking, of listening attentively, reveals his spirit in every word he pronounces, and in those words, his concern for everyone else.
Although we know this world is formed by the indignant and the undignified, and that this is a defiled world, people like Javier give us hope. He has a big responsibility, and he knows it. And he also knows that he is not alone.
And this also gives him strength. When he comes home each day he can hug his partner Isolda and ask once again why he has become one of the motors that motivate this mobilization. But now he is at the front of a national movement that on May 8 brought marches in 38 cities all at once. Javier has felt the horror, lived the pain. But he is a poet and a father with a mission to complete. We unite ourselves in what makes us human. We come together in the search of a soil where political problems can be talked about and benefit the nation.
This is a war against the Mexican people, and that is why we are all united. And it is that for the first time in a long time, thousands of people occupy the streets of Mexico and demonstrate peacefully to seek and end to the war and the violence in their country. Why now? Why this way? The violence does not discriminate and it harms all. His words are inclusive and he has achieved an unexpected cohesion among peoples: from the EZLN to businessmen to the middle class, a cohesion to end the war on drugs.
The left identifies with him. He is a journalist and the profession identifies with him. He is a poet and all kinds of artists also identify with him. He is a Catholic and the Catholics have shown their solidarity with him.
His son was of the middle class and it seems the entire middle class, with or without children, has come out into the streets. We have been able to hug each other and accompany each other naming our pain. And we have been able to begin to demand that the State be reconstituted in the name of society. He did not expect the uniting of classes, but he offers appreciation for it daily.
We cannot lose sight of the heart. Ideological and political speeches impose themselves over human dignity. These victims have names. They are not statistics. At the heart of it, everything depends on whether we keep loving the poetic word, listening to the heart, to the deep human within, listening to what life is, and forget about the ideological differences or that political differences or those between the political parties.
The human being and the human heart have to be the reference point, no matter where it comes from.
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