The poet who fights for peace in Mexico.
The intellectual Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered, leads a movement to find the thousands of disappeared
The War of the Narco contaminates Mexico
A telephone rang at dawn in the Philippines, where the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia had gone to read his verses at the Cervantes Institute. "Your son has been murdered," said a voice. A single call served to break a father, silence a poet and light an activist.
Sicily, the intellectual, fell from that March 2011 in the hell of his country. He decided to go over it, judge it and touch it in order to fight it. "Hell is fought when you get down to it," he says. Now that the figure of 100,000 has been reached, there are almost 250,000 victims since the beginning of the War of the Narco and the year 2017 has been the most violent since then, its voice is again a reference for some and a threat for others.
"We have a criminal state in collusion with organized crime where human beings have become a bargaining chip, and nobody is safe," says the man who led the only massive response, Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, which has been produced in Mexico in favor of the victims and against corruption and violence. "We fought a lot, we toured this country and the US because they put their guns and put their noses in to take cocaine, we created the law of attention to the victims and we simply advance millimeters before a Government and a crime that advances kilometers. without hope but all we have left is to resist, lighting candles so that the night is not absolute ".
The Mexican intellectual, winner of important poetry prizes, also points to society as guilty. "Society is looking the other way". Did Mexico falter? "Yes, he is being very cowardly, we are not able to maintain a continuous resistance and then we fall back and then it becomes cowardly, the country is crumbling, democracy is a great simulation, we have criminal governments that work with organized crime."
On the role of Mexican intellectuals in the face of violence and corruption, Sicily is also critical: "One sees them astray and not attentive to violence but interested in a big smokescreen that are elections, they are very far from reality. that the country is not so bad, the intellectual class is very co-opted with scholarships, embassies, research posts. "
In the midst of all this drama, Sicilia continues to work to give dignity to the victims. From his movement he continues to help find those 30,000 disappeared whose bodies rot in common graves. "I was able to rescue my son's body and honor him, but the disappearance victim can not close anything that is not an infernal hope, where is he, does he eat, is he mistreated, will he be in one of those graves? Slut, there is no rest, it is a hope open to the infinity of hell, "he says, emphasizing that social duality that the country is part of:" To feel reality you have to go to it, you have to smell it. it is below the comfort zones where 25 million of the 120 Mexicans move. "
Meanwhile, death records continue to grow exponentially. To beat the record of homicides in 2017 is a failure of the security policies of the current government team that came to the Presidency promising to pacify the country. The cartels disintegrate, divide, their leaders are arrested, and the violence does not stop growing: "It is not acceptable that killings between drug gangs be allowed because it is a way for them to annihilate themselves. of perpetual violence. " Do you agree with the comparison that is sometimes made of Mexico with Syria or Iral? "Absolutely, and worse, there are ideological reasons, here nothing more is played economic reasons," says Sicilia.
The movement of this intellectual has partly disintegrated. The victims themselves were divided and some of the leaders of those marches were captured by political parties. The country socially seems today asleep. Sicily has an alarm device, he knows that his denunciations place him as a target: "We are all at risk, we have security measures that are useless but the government pretends that it protects you".
Perhaps the greatest referent of the social struggle against violence in his country ends his coffee, he puts on his hat and assures, when asked if he will break the promise he made when his son died of not writing poetry again, that "a country where it kills itself as it kills itself, disappears as it disappears, politicians lie to justify atrocities, it is a country where their language is dead, and I believe that in front of that the most worthy act of a poet is to be silent. accomplice of that shit and the best poem in circumstances like this is the unwritten poem ".