By Paco Gómez

“If we were fed up a year ago, today we are fed up in a more profound and brutal way,” said Javier Sicilia in Cuernavaca at the March 28 commemoration of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity's first anniversary.

He spoke firmly and asked citizens to leave their voting ballots blank in the upcoming July elections. He spoke in front of a small but committed audience that had carried out a day full of symbolic acts, performances and protest.

The MPJD was born from death. It was Sicilia’s reaction to the appearance of his murdered son Juan Francisco’s body and those of other six friends, with a poetic and emotive letter one year ago, exactly on the 28^th of March. His words and steps inspired a great national march that arrived at the Zócalo in Mexico City the following May.

For Spanish click here.

The Goal Is Clear: Peace With Justice and Dignity

The one-year anniversary of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a grassroots groundswell against the drug war, played out March 28 in a small plaza in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City — absent the cameras and pens of the mainstream media.

By Paco Gómez

The Loudest Yell, a collective of over 250 artists, has thanked the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) for “showing the way to being a country”. The actor Daniel Giménez Cacho read an announcement by the artist collective at the one year anniversary of MPJD.

For Spanish click here.

The main plaza in Cuernavaca is full of activity: speeches, poems, prayers, heartbreaking testimonies and altars of the victims of the Drug War fill the scene. Today’s event commemorates the first year of an organization that fights against death: the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD). Maybe that´s why there are two tiny women that go unseen. Together they breathe a deep sigh. Until they look in each other’s eyes, until they talk, until they tell their stories.

Versión en español

By Ahlam Said

Walking through Cuernavaca Plaza yesterday was like being caught between a memorial service and a celebration.  Pictures of the deceased were everywhere: screen-printed on t-shirts, hanging across stone walls, surrounded by candles near Jesus and Mary statues, and even on balloons in children’s hand. Yet, there couldn’t possibly be enough space in the plaza to display the pictures of over 60,000 who have died and the 20,000 who have disappeared since the Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, militarized the drug war in 2006.

Click here for Spanish.

By: The School of Authentic Journalism

This Wednesday March 28th 2012the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) will commemorate 12 months of protests and actions in Cuernavaca, Morelos.  This event will seek to remember, with "pain, rage, and love", the dead, disappeared, and victims of the federal government's war against drug trafficking. Victims of the war will make offerings, and participate in indigenous and ecumenical ceremonies, performance art, poetry readings, and testimonials beginning at 11AM and continuing well into the night. 

Versión en Español

Reported US Military Ramp-up on the Border Follows Years of ATF-Sanctioned Gun Running

U.S. troops deployed to the US/Mexican border last week may well be there, in part, to deal with the blowback from ATF's botched Fast and Furious gambit.