•  mexico city
• Friday, April 08, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Thousands of people took to the streets in 20 cities across Mexico Wednesday to protest the wave of drug-related killings, in demonstrations triggered by the murder of the son of poet Javier Sicilia, in another show of the power of social networking sites in channelling public outrage.

At the time set for the protest, 5:00 PM (11:00 PM GMT), there were no more than 1,000 demonstrators on the esplanade outside the Palace of Fine Arts in downtown Mexico City. 'We're going to face a national emergency with this?' one young woman asked her friends in a discouraged voice.

Fifteen minutes later, when a group of students from the Claustro de Sor Juana private university began to lead the march, the column started to widen, although there were not enough people yet to prevent the anxious looks of activists who peered back to check on the size of the crowd.

But by 6:30, when the first protesters reached the National Palace, the seat of the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón, they breathed a sigh of relief: the plaza was packed full of people.

Estimates by participants in the protest in the Mexican capital ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 demonstrators. That might sound like a small number in a city of 21 million people. But it was seen as impressive for the first protest to emerge from the social networking sites, against the spiralling violence that has plagued this country over the last few years.

'It is an impressive demonstration, if you consider that there was no organisation, political party or TV station behind it,' Agustín Guerrero, a federal lawmaker of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), told IPS, walking alongside the party's local leader, Manuel Oropeza.

This time, the mainstream media did not play a central role in the demonstrations, and were reluctant guests in a citizen movement, which in just 48 hours took off in Twitter and Facebook, giving rise to protests in 20 cities in Mexico and half a dozen cities in several other countries.

The call for the protest was launched by poet Javier Sicilia, who writes for the weekly newspaper Proceso. His 24-year-old son Juan Francisco was killed Mar. 28 along with three of his friends and three other people. The seven bodies were found in a car parked in an upscale neighbourhood in Morelos, a state that borders the capital. The victims bore signs of torture, and their bodies were bound.

Javier Sicilia, a well-known pacifist, quickly became a symbol for millions of Mexicans tired of the bloodshed unleashed when Calderón launched an all-out offensive against the drug cartels upon taking office in December 2006.

The strategy, which has involved the participation of the military in the war on organised crime, has left 35,000 people dead in four years, and an undetermined number of widows, orphans, victims of forced disappearance, maimed victims, and people who have been forced to leave their homes or flee into exile.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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