Crowds of angry citizens gathered in more than 20 Mexican cities on Wednesday to vent their anger over widespread violence linked to the country’s illegal drug trade.
The protest marches were organized following the murder of a well-known author’s son along with four close friends and two others on March 28.
Javier Sicilia, a poet and columnist for the daily La Jornada and the weekly Proceso — two of the country’s leading publications — called for the protests following the killing of his son Juan Francisco, 24, near Cuernavaca, 90km south of Mexico City.
Photo: Reuters
Sicilia on Wednesday met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon for an update on the probe into his son’s death.
“We are sick and tired of you politicians ... because in your struggle for power you have torn asunder the fabric of the nation,” Sicilia wrote in an open letter out on Monday. “You have been incapable of creating the consensus that the nation needs to find unity.”
Sicilia suggested in a subsequent interview that the government should negotiate a truce with the country’s drug cartels.
The writer will lead the march in Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos state. Protesters are also scheduled to march in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey and other cities.
In his open letter, Sicilia derided Calderon’s massive anti-drug sweep, launched in late 2006, as a “poorly designed, poorly managed and poorly led” affair that “has left the country in a state of emergency.”
Meanwhile, at least 59 bodies have been found on a ranch in Mexico’s northern state of Tamaulipas, on the US border, authorities said on Wednesday, warning that the grim toll could rise.
The Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office said 11 people had been arrested and another five kidnapping victims had been set free in the same operation on Wednesday.
Police and military staff learned on March 25 that several buses had disappeared in the area, leading to their investigation, which turned up a grisly find: eight mass graves in the La Joya farming village in the town of San Fernando, the prosecutor’s office said.
“With our work that is under way, we are trying to establish if the remains are those of the people who went missing on the buses,” the prosecutor’s statement said.
Authorities said they feared the number of dead would rise, as the remains had only been counted in three of eight mass graves. A -military patrol located the mass grave, the source said.
The gruesome find was in the same town of San Fernando where 72 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil were killed in August last year for refusing to work for drug traffickers.
Authorities said on Saturday that 20 people were killed in under 24 hours in Mexico’s most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, which borders the US state of Texas.
Ciudad Juarez is considered the most violent city in Mexico, with more than 3,100 homicides last year. Most of the violence is blamed on drug cartels, who fight for control of lucrative drug routes into the US.
On Monday, the US boosted security at its consulate in Mexico’s drug war-rocked northern city of Monterrey, where it built a second protective ring wall.
Two other US consulates on the Mexican side of the shared border were temporarily closed last year. Security concerns forced the office in Ciudad Juarez to close for several days, while another in Nuevo Laredo was closed after an explosive device attack.
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