Not Giving Up on Our City: Fasting in Ciudad Juárez

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico:

“No more blood in exchange for a hypocritical control of drugs, nor for the wealth generated by weapons that invade our country, no more youth murdered, no more cries of parents, of women. Enough! This is a territory for life!”

So said Perla de la Rosa of the “Pact for Culture” to start the binational rally Saturday celebrated at the fence dividing Mexico and the United States outside Ciudad Juarez, the city with the highest murder rate in the world. Activists from Juárez and from El Paso, Texas organized the rally in conjunction with a fast in Juárez calling for justice and commemorating the first anniversary of a massacre of 16 teenagers in Juárez. With small stages and sound systems on both sides of the fence, they took turns speaking and listening to each other, mothers of those killed, poets, immigration attorneys, activists against femicide, priests, students, doctors, going back and forth between Spanish and English, overcoming for a moment the “absurd border” between us.

I’d come to Ciudad Juárez in response to a call from community organizations here to fast against the war and for justice. More than 3,100 murders were committed in Juárez last year. Over the fence in El Paso, there were just five. I’d come because I’d learned about the 60,000 guns sold in the United States and used in crimes in Mexico. Because my compatriots pay for the vast majority of cocaine and marijuana that is financing the narco-cartels in Mexico. Because the United States has responded to the violence by sending more guns and capacity for violence to armed forces that increasing evidence shows is part of the drug trade, instead of addressing the reasons for consumption in our communities. Because our nation is obsessed with low prices for goods that until recently were produced in maquiladora assembly plants at the Mexico-U.S. border, at any human and environmental cost, and calls those who make these goods aliens. Because after you know enough, if you don’t act, something goes cold inside you.

I’ll write more in this space in the coming days. Until then, here are a couple moments from the fast, in which about 60 of us stayed the night under the monument to Benito Juárez in a downtown park, stealing fear from the violence, bending that fear into something else. Yes, many folks stayed home because of that fear. But the participants expressed what I’d call elation at having organized themselves, vigiled for each other, kept warm in the cold desert night, and taken a public space for nonviolent community participation and expression. Hundreds more participated in events during the day on Saturday and Sunday, including in Villas de Salvárcar.

In one circle of dialogue in the park, a woman recounted the day she was walking and came upon police beating a youth, kicking him mercilessly. She told the police they should stop, this wasn’t their job, what were they doing? They told her to be quiet, and started to threaten her, saying they would take her away. A policeman pointed his gun right at her, and she said, “If you’re going to kill me, kill me.” But, she said, she was a member of a human rights organization, and started to dial a local human rights leader on her cell phone. Eventually, they decided not to arrest her. Her courage is especially striking because the Federal Preventive Police are notorious here for extorting, beating, and killing at will.

“This isn’t a war of the state against narcos,” said one activist to us, “but a fraticidal war between sectors of the state,” who work with the narcos.

What to do? We can start by urging the Obama administration to cut aid to the military and police in Mexico that are only making the problem worse. You can do that now through an action alert issued by Witness for Peace.

You can also support restrictions on the murderous gun trade moving from our country to Mexico. FOR is part of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which has important material and action alerts.

I feel deeply grateful to the brave activists of the Paso del Norte Human Rights Center and many others who organized the events of recent days, who received Ted Lewis of Global Exchange and I, who brought together many different sectors in the fast and rally, and who have not given up on their city. It makes me more determined not to give up on my own country.