“A father’s plea: End the war on drugs”

The title of this post is the headline of this new commentary by Javier Sicilia appearing at CNN.  Here is how it begins:

Why was my son murdered?  He was 24, and he had never tried drugs.  He didn’t even smoke. He had paid half his university costs with a sports scholarship and was working as administrative staff at a cardiac clinic in Morelos, Mexico. Why then was my son suffocated by hit men from the Gulf Cartel?  Why did his six friends, just like him, die at his side?

The answer, you may tell me, is obvious. “Because drug traffickers are bad, and must be stopped.” The answer, however, is not that simple.  If it were I would not be leading a caravan for peace across the United States.  Let’s pose the question differently.  If Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon had treated drug abuse as a question of public health rather than a matter of national security, might my son and his friends still be alive today? If instead of declaring war on drug trafficking, Calderón had pursued a bilateral agenda with the United States to decriminalize drugs and regulate their use, is it possible that they and tens of thousands of other young people killed in the last six years would be still be with us?

Declaring a war obliges one’s enemy to build up defensive armies.  And if the principal tactic of that war is identifying and taking out crime syndicate leaders, it leaves their decapitated, but ever profitable, organizations adrift.  President Calderon went on the offensive against cartel “capos.” The result was a proliferation of criminal gangs.

My son, Juan Francisco, and his friends were kidnapped, tortured and killed by one of those new splinter gangs, who did the hit for just $25,000 and two pickup trucks.

Why? One of the young men killed with my son had complained about a theft in the valet parking of a bar that turned out to be managed by one of the criminal gangs untethered after drug lord Beltrán Leyva was killed and his lieutenants scattered.  “Comandante H,” a former Beltrán Leyva confidante, was recently apprehended by authorities, telling his captors, “I was quite outraged when they murdered Sicilia’s son and his friends.  Murdering innocent people is not our business.  Our business is drugs.  But I was fleeing, and I could not do anything.”

The horrific story of my son and his friends is one of thousands like it in our country.  More than 60,000 people have been killed and 20,000 have disappeared because of the myopic war strategy Felipe Calderon and the Mexican security forces have pursued since 2006. Some murder estimates are even higher.

That is why I stopped writing poetry and took to the streets with thousands of other grieving Mexicans to make my son, and other victims like him, visible.  Now, I’m traveling across the United States with members of dozens of families broken by violence to seek common cause with Americans whose communities, especially the African American and Latino communities who have so warmly hosted us, that have been battered by the violence and the criminalization that this same counterproductive war inflicts on the U.S. side of the border.