Protests and pain on the Mexican border
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It was a grim weekend along the Mexican border. Families did their best to celebrate Mexican Mother’s Day, while protesters walked for the dead and the country reeled from a week of escalating drug-related violence.
This past Saturday was Mother’s Day in Mexico, an enormously important day in the family calendar. Here in Mexico, families come together in their homes to eat and celebrate. But the Mother’s Day scene in Tijuana was far from celebratory, according to the Washington Post.
You can walk to the U.S. border, Francelia Menchaca’s immigration lawyer advised her, but don’t put your fingers through its fence. It may hinder her immigration paperwork, the lawyer said. But when, after a year apart, Menchaca’s mother arrived in her flowered straw hat here Saturday and put her small, wrinkled hands up to the cast-iron gate, Menchaca reached out and touched them.
Further east along the border in Ciudad Juarez, thousands marched Sunday in protest of the wave of drug-related killings that recently left four high-ranking police officials dead, including the No. 2 police official, Juan Antonio Roman Garcia, who was slain Saturday.
The crowd of several thousand students, church leaders, businessmen and politicians walked for about four miles (six kilometers) across Ciudad Juarez to a park near a border crossing, breaking the silence in a burst of speeches, dancing and singing. Miami Herald
More than 200 people have been killed in Juarez alone this year by drug violence. Read the most recent La Plaza dispatch on this issue here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City