Fear route in Mexico's peace tour(1)

Carlos Sánchez knows a lot about the fear faced by Mexican society today, because he crisscrosses the country in his job as a bus driver. But he feels that now he has begun to help fight it, driving one of the vehicles in the Peace and Justice Caravan headed by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia.

Sánchez, 45, said he was happy that the head of the private bus company he works for asked him to drive one of the buses in which the peace caravan is heading northward to Ciudad Juárez on the U.S. border.

"The violence and crime are terrible in this country, and it's good that people are doing something," he said as he drove, before launching into a lengthy description of the horrors he sees in his job: bodies on the roadside, shootouts, armed assaults – day-to-day scenes of which he is an invisible and mute witness.

"No justice has ever been done for the innocent victims. In Reynosa (in the northern state of Tamaulipas) you can see the fear in people's faces," he says, before adding almost to himself: "This isn't a safe job anymore. What future lies ahead for my kids?"

The "caravan of solace", as Sicilia has dubbed it, is a winding ride by 13 buses and 25 cars carrying peace activists and relatives of victims from around the country through a number of the cities that have been hit hardest by the drug violence that has spiralled in this country over the last few years.

The caravan set out on Saturday June 4 from Cuernavaca, capital of the central state of Morelos, where Sicilia's son, Juan Francisco, and six other young people were tortured and murdered Mar. 28, allegedly by drug gangs.

From there it headed to Mexico City and Morelia, capital of the west-central state of Michoacán, where the La Familia drug cartel is based. In Morelia, eight people were killed in 2008 when grenades were thrown into a crowd of people celebrating Mexico's Independence Day.

Sunday night it stopped in San Luis Potosí, capital of the state of the same name, where a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed in February.

On Monday they continued through the neighbouring states of Zacatecas and Durango, where mass graves containing the remains of at least 200 people have been found since April.

Tuesday's stop is Monterrey, capital of the northeastern state of Nuevo León, which went from being the country's most prosperous industrial city to a battleground of the drug cartels. From there it will head to the adjacent state of Coahuila and after that on to Chihuahua, where the participants will stay the night Wednesday in the state capital.

By the time it reaches Ciudad Juárez, the most violent city in Latin America, Thursday the caravan will have travelled 3,000 kilometres and will have offered solace in exchange for dozens of stories of pain shared in gatherings that bring together families of victims, to show them that they are not alone.

In Ciudad Juárez a social pact will be signed calling for an end to the militarisation of the country, the strategy followed to fight the drug cartels since conservative President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006.

Since the government's "war on drugs" began, there have been at least 40,000 drug-related murders.

The social pact will call for militarization to be replaced by a model of law enforcement and public safety based on the reconstruction of the social fabric and on respect for human rights.

In a packed public square on Saturday, Sicilia heard the accounts of people from Cherán, an indigenous village where the people have mounted blockades and taken security into their own hands since Apr. 15 to keep out illegal loggers allied with drug traffickers.

One of the women who spoke was María Herrera Magdalena, who said four of her sons have disappeared since August 2008. "Every night I imagine their faces, hoping to see them again," she said, in one of the most moving moments since the march began.

On Saturday, when the caravan was setting out, the army arrested Jorge Hank Rhon, a former mayor of Tijuana who belongs to a powerful family that is generally considered "untouchable."

The arrest of Rhon, a leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), pushed news of the start of the peace tour off the front pages of the newspapers in Mexico.

It also overshadowed the second anniversary of a fire in which 49 children were killed in a public day care centre in Hermosillo, capital of the northeast state of Sonora – a tragedy for which no one has been held responsible, despite clear signs of negligence found by a Supreme Court inquiry.