Drug Reform Movement Finds Home With Mexican Activists in US Julian Aguilar - Texas Tribune
go to original August 29, 2012

A member of the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity marches on the state Capitol. (Julian Aguilar/Texas Tribune)

Maria Guadalupe Guzman Romo wasn’t concerned about legalizing pot in Texas when she marched on the state Capitol last weekend.

But there she stood anyway, just a few feet away from a giant banner that called for an end to the prohibition of marijuana and the taxing of hemp. Guzman Romo was there because of her son, a former Mexican army soldier who disappeared from Ciudad Juárez in 1993, decades before the current drug war that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

“I tell them not to feel defeated. I have been fighting 19 years and I haven’t stopped,” she said of the advice she offers relatives of those who were recently kidnapped or murdered. “And I won’t stop until I find my son, because I handed him over alive and alive they shall return him to me.”

Guzman Romo was part of the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a group started by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia and whose members have been affected by drug-related violence in Mexico. Sicilia’s son was murdered in the central Mexican city of Morelos in 2011, prompting the poet to become a harsh critic of U.S. and Mexican drug policies.

Guzman Romo doesn’t mention the United States' war on drugs, but her cause has been joined by Americans who have found an opportunity in the publicity surrounding the violence in Mexico to shine attention to their own agendas in the U.S. Unlike Guzman Romo, whose mission is to bring attention to her son’s disappearance, others have joined the caravan out of opposition to an initiative that they say is causing such murders and disappearances in Mexico — and destroying families in America.

Read more at The Texas Tribune

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