The Citizens’ Pact for a Mexico in Peace http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4592

In the face of a national emergency, today more than ever, drastic measures are needed to end this war end its escalating violence, and reweave the social and communal fabric. This perilous and profoundly violent moment is the result of economic structures that create inequality and exclusion. Slow death reigns here, death brought by poverty’s torment, unemployment, a lack of opportunities for the full development of our lives and the destruction of the environment.

The war against drugs is a manifestation of policies and international agreements that cast Mexico as the battlefield and where the poor of this country and Central America pay the staggering price of their lives so that drugs arrive at their destination and business empires thrive. Facing this situation, the State has chosen a military strategy to confront organized crime and social protest, promoting a process of intensive and extensive militarization of public security not only through the broad deployment of military forces in national territory, but also through the growing practice of putting military commanders at the head of civilian police forces.

The consequence of this strategy, which emphasizes violent confrontation, is a civil war in which Mexicans are killing Mexicans. This strategy has caused forty-thousand deaths in the last four years. Just in April of this year, 1,427 bodies found in narco-graves were added to the toll. Civilian victims are in the thousands, more than 230 thousand have been displaced, ten thousand have been orphaned (though some estimate as many as thirty-thousand) ten thousand migrants have been kidnapped and thirty mayors have been assassinated.

[ALSO SEE..US-FAKE WAR ON DRUGS-Consumers and Guns, Assassins and Money: Mexico’s Transnational Violence https://nacla.org/news/consumers-and-guns-assassins-and-money-mexico’s-transnational-violence Top Mexican Drug Lord: I Trafficked Cocaine For The U.S. Government http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/04/mexican-narco-trafficker-s-revelation-exposes-drug-war-s-duplicity   ------------------------ Sinaloa Drug Cartel Controlled and Protected by Both Mexican and U.S http://deadlinelive.info/2011/04/15/deadline-live-exclusive-sinaloa-drug-cartel-controlled-and-protected-by-both-mexican-and-u-s-governments/ U.S.-Backed Programs Supplying the Firepower for Mexico’s Soaring Murder Rate Felipe Calderón's Drug War Has Become Hot Market for U.S. Arms Trade http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/04/us-backed-programs-supplying-firepower-mexico-s-soaring-murder-rate