Javier Sicilia Talks to L.A.
Let me start with a few verses from “Not Dark Yet” by Bob Dylan:
[…] I’ve been down on the bottom of a
World full of lies/ I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes/
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear/ It’s not dark yet, but
it’s getting there […]
We blame this darkness, which has not
stopped threatening Mexico and the United States, and which portrays the
face of hundreds of thousands of dead, disappeared, persecuted,
tortured, butchered, displaced and incarcerated; for all of them, I ask
for a minute of silence.
We have reached, as Dylan says, the
“bottom of a world full of lies” underneath war, especially when it
comes to such an absurd war as the one against drugs. We call such
bottom death, humiliation, illegal trade of guns, money laundering,
criminalization, corruption, fear, horror, prisons, the strengthening of
crime and government violence. For the same reason, we refer to it as
the crisis of democracy, the annihilation of freedoms and the contempt
for immigrants. This bottom of pain is also, as the song of Dylan says:
“a burden that seems more than we can bear”.
The burden we bear upon us contains the
weight of our dead, of our missing ones, of those displaced, of our
criminalized and humiliated immigrants and, in my case, the weight of
the murdering of a good, professional and athletic son, who had never
tried drugs; an innocent victim of this imbecilic war just as thousands
more. Despite this tragedy, that we have not ceased carrying as a burden
for over a year, instead of looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes as
Dylan says, we are looking for something, always looking for something
in everyone’s eyes: relief, justice and a path to peace. We have done so
in Mexico, traveling across the country and holding a dialogue with
everyone. We now do it here, traveling across the United States while
intending to also hold a dialogue with you, because if Mexico has grave
responsibilities for this war that is sinking everything into darkness,
the United States also has a part in this. This war began here 40 years
ago, when president Nixon decided against all sense of democracy and
forgetting what had formerly happened with the prohibition of alcohol in
the 30’s, that drugs are not a matter of freedom, of the market and the
government’s control, but a matter of national security that had to be
fought through violence.
Since then, in order to protect the 23
million drug consumers in the United States, this nation initiated this
war that has destroyed Colombia and which now in turn is destroying
Mexico, Central America, and is also menacing to destroy in the medium
term the United States itself. This is nothing but the imposition of
barbarity over civilization, of violence over peace and the triumph of
authoritarianism over democracy.
This war’s failure is devastating: the
23 million American drug consumers are far from diminishing but
increasing instead; in the past 5 years, Mexico has accumulated almost
70 thousand dead, more than 20 thousand missing people, more than 250
thousand have been displaced, along with hundreds of thousands of widows
and orphans, and these figures keep rising. The American gun
manufacturers arm the organized crime through illegal trade, while the
Mérida Initiative legally arms the Mexican army, fostering war. The
American jails imprison millions of human beings because of drug
consumption. The immigrants are criminalized on this side of the border
and extorted or made to disappear on the other side; the temptation to
militarize using the police regime emerges on both sides, while setting a
deep crisis for democracy and undermining the greatness of open
societies.
“It’s not dark yet”, says Dylan’s song,
but this reality foretells that night is about to fall, obscure,
terrible and deeper than the shadows that are foreboding. But not yet,
not yet, not yet, as we stated more than a year ago in Mexico City’s
Zocalo, despite the unquenchable necessity, despite all the suffering,
despite all this nameless pain, despite the growing and progressive lack
of peace, despite the growing confusion, not yet.
If we are to prevent this night from
arriving and enduring forever, the responsibility to stop it falls on
all of us, not only on the Mexican and American citizens, but also on
Central and Latin America.
If you, people of the United States, do
not take on the errors of your governments – as we are doing with ours –
and ask them to change their war policies toward drugs, to exert a
strict control over the illegal gun trafficking into Mexico, to demand
them to drastically attack money laundering, and to create human and
inclusive policies for immigrants in order to rebuild not only the
social tissue of México, but also that of Central America and the places
within the United States stroked by misery, this night will in fact
arrive, an absolute night, tantamount to the one that spread over those
countries where crime, authoritarianism and militarism has rooted.
Only together we can save our democracy so threatened by war.
The pain of Mexico, Central America,
Colombia and Brazil is not, as many of you believe and as some media
intend to set in your minds, a matter merely concerning these citizens.
Rather, it is a commonly shared issue that has emerged here as a war
which was lost from its very inception, because it is absurd and because
it has already cost too much pain.
This is why, from here, from Los
Angeles, from the state of California, one of the fairest faces of
democracy, we ask you, citizens of all over the United States, using the
same words that many years ago Bob Dylan addressed while the
devastating Vietnam War was taking place: “How many ears must one
man have/ Before he can hear people cry?/ How many deaths will it take/
till he knows/ That too many people have died?”
Do not wait until this pain reaches your
own lives to listen to the cry that we have not ceased to utter; do not
wait until the death that this war has unleashed sets into your lives,
as it did in ours, to know that death exists and that it must be
stopped. This is the moment for us together to change this policy of war
and save peace, life and democracy.
I will finish paraphrasing some verses
from Bertol Brecht that, as some say, are really those of the Lutheran
pastor Martin Niemöller, verses that appeal to your conscience and your
heart:
“One day they humiliated Colombians/ and
I said nothing / because I was not Colombian / Then they tore Mexicans
apart / and I said nothing / because I was not Mexican. / One day they
came to get the African-Americans / but I said nothing / because I was
not African-American. / Then they messed with the immigrants/ and I said
nothing / because I was not an immigrant. / And then one day when they
came for me / there was no one left either to protest, to stop war or
death, or to save democracy.”
Los Angeles, California, August 13th 2012. More about the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity in the USA headed to Washington DC
Not Dark Yet
ResponderEliminarEric Clapton doing Dylan....
WELCOME CARAVANA!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKi69T6AsUU&feature=related
un saludo desde el semidesierto chihuahuense next to New Mexico...
Óscar Enrique Ornelas