Fear route in Mexico's peace tour(2)

In San Luis Potosí, Sicilia spoke for the first time of possible acts of civil disobedience: "If we don't manage to transform the heart of the institutions (with the caravan and the social pact), there are other weapons, other legitimate non-violent means, such as a tax boycott or civil disobedience."

On the way out of San Luis Potosí, the caravan learned that the night before, the federal police carried out a raid without a warrant on the offices of the Paso del Norte Human Rights Centre headed by Catholic priest Óscar Enríquez, one of Ciudad Juárez's most prominent organizations.

The news caused tension among the participants as they headed into areas with a heavier presence of organized criminal gangs, and prompted the drivers to demand that the organizers make the caravan more compact and shorten the public events in towns along the way, to avoid driving at night.

The caravan has once again brought together many of the victims' families who took part in the May 8 peace march that marked the start of a new movement organized by people who have lost loved ones in the wave of violence.

In front of the Ángel de la Independencia monument in the Mexican capital, Julián Lebarón from the state of Chihuahua read out a letter addressed to Juan Francisco Sicilia, saying "this collective tragedy has to be capable of bringing us together as never before in history. This time the cause won't be an earthquake or a flood; the cause is a seed of scorn for us, the people of Mexico.

"I am marching to shout that the dead are someone's sons and daughters, they aren't stones or numbers…I don't want to be anyone's anonymous son, I don't want apathy to end up wiping us all away," said Lebarón, who added that the march "is for us to find each other again, on a route of humanity and strength."

The organizers hope that more vehicles and demonstrators will join the caravan as it approaches Ciudad Juárez, where civil society organizations are preparing a welcome. But before they get there, the participants have to drive through dangerous areas where drug trafficking gangs operate and kill – areas where Carlos Sánchez has seen so many horrors.

The 1980 Nobel prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an Argentinian who joined Sicilia’s movement, sent a letter to media outlets asking to avoid stigmatizing the death and their families.

“The ‘It was for something’ or ‘What was he into? are classic sentences in the kidnapping and forced disappearance of tens of thousands in Latin America,” said Perez Esquivel. He also asked the international community to help find alternatives to stop "the genocide.”