Damien Cave: These Walls Speak, Recalling Mexico's Victims of Violence Damien Cave - The New York Times
go to original August 24, 2013

In April, Mexico unveiled the controversial memorial dedicated to drug war victims next to Campo Marte (Mars Field) in Chapultepec Park. The metal panels are inscribed with quotations from thinkers like Octavio Paz and messages from members of the public who have lost loved ones. (AFP)

MEXICO CITY - The memorial to Mexico's victims of violence looks like it has been dropped from the sky by an angry God. Welcoming it is not, with its rusted slabs the size of movie screens standing next to a busy intersection.

Nor is its mission clear. Even before it was inaugurated in April, the monument had set off debate over whether it should be a tribute to all the drug war's killed, missing, kidnapped and extorted - or just those subjected to human rights abuses by the Mexican authorities.

But then, you walk a little closer and the slabs begin to speak.

The graffiti scribbled in white paint across the hunk of steel introducing the memorial — "Paint what you feel … express what you think" — is not vandalism. It's a request: Share. Remember. Grieve.

By design, the metal panels are blank pages. Quotations chosen by the architects, from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and others, appear in the corners, cut out like stencils. The rest is open to public expression.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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