Remember the Memory They No Longer Have

On March 28, 2011 a 24 year old man named Juan Francisco Silicia was killed in Mexico's Drug War. In the 5 years since the Calderon government in Mexico began the Drug War, nearly 40,000 people have been killed as, in the terminology of the government, collateral damage.

Juan Francisco could have been just one more young person cut off in the prime of his life and forgotten to history except for this: his father is a well known poet in Mexico by the name of Javier Silicia.

Poets love words and the power words give. Although typically this is no different with Javier Silicia, since the death of his son, whom he called Juanelo, "poetry doesn't exist in my anymore." So, he has decided to use his words in a campaign to remember the dead and to give power to the living, as he said at the funeral:

The world is not worthy of words

they have been suffocated from the inside

as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs …

the pain does not leave me

all that remains is a world

through the silence of the righteous,

only through your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

 Thus he has called for a series of protests since the death of his son. Across Mexico over 40 cities have participated in silent marches they are calling "We Have Had It" protests. And, perhaps even more poignantly, people across Mexico are being called on to remember those who have died in the Drug War by placing name plaques in prominant locations throughout the country's public squares. In an interview, Silicia says that putting up the plaques with the names of the people who have died innocently is a way to "remember the memory they no longer have."

In another interview, Silicia says “What unites us is the heart to return the dream to this nation. At the heart of it, everything depends on whether we keep loving the poetic word, listening to the heart, to the deep human within, listening to what life is, and forget about the ideological differences or that political differences or those between the political parties. The human being and the human heart have to be the reference point, no matter where it comes from.”

Recently, Silicia has started a new front to the protests: a peace tour from Morelos to Cuidad Juarez. Since this is considered by many to be the most dangerous city in the world right now, perhaps the poetry of words that Silicia has lost has been transformed into the poetry of action. And perhaps this is what happens when one loses love and thus begins "listening to what life is."