Pubdate: Wed, 08 Aug 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Tracy Wilkinson

Mexico Under Siege:

DRUG WAR MEMORIAL INSPIRES DEBATE

Mexico Has Chosen the Design and Site, but Conflict Remains Over Who 
Should Be Honored and How.

MEXICO CITY - It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: a 
memorial to the thousands of victims of the drug violence that has 
convulsed Mexico for most of the last decade.

Washington, after all, has its Vietnam War memorial. New York has its 
monument at the site of the World Trade Center.

But even as the winning design was being announced, Mexico's tribute 
was stricken by the conflicting visions and bitter disputes that have 
driven wedges into Mexican society.

Innocent civilians, police officers on duty and soldiers fighting 
drug cartels are among the more than 50,000 dead in the government's 
crackdown on the cartels. But there are also huge numbers of bad 
guys: traffickers, their thuggish gunmen, their corrupt politician 
accomplices. Does the memorial speak for all of them? And if not, how 
do you winnow the memorialized?

And how do you pay homage to the unknown? Most of the drug war's dead 
are nameless, bodies unidentified, survivors in hiding.

Then there's the issue of who's footing the $2-million bill: the same 
government that many peace activists blame, at least in part, for the violence.

The selected design, by architect Ricardo Lopez, is a stand of 15 
steel walls arrayed around a reflecting pool off Mexico City's iconic 
Reforma Boulevard. According to artists' renderings, the walls 
resemble rust-colored billboards, some with mirrors that will reflect 
the trees in the surrounding park.

The idea of erecting a memorial came from activists protesting the 
violence, which has also left 10,000 missing and thousands more 
survivors of kidnappings and rapes. Chief among the activists is 
Isabel Miranda de Wallace, an upper-middle-class matron who became 
involved when her son was kidnapped and killed.

"This is to have a space where we all can pass by ... to remember the 
pain we have lived, the people we have lost," Miranda de Wallace, who 
was the unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Mexico City this year for 
the ruling conservative National Action Party, said in an interview.

But another prominent activist, poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was 
killed by presumed drug traffickers when he was out one night with 
friends, is having none of it.

"This is not a memorial; it is an insult ... a barbarity," said 
Sicilia, whose followers lean mostly to the left.

"A true memorial must be part of a process, a process of identifying 
the dead, of acknowledging the truth, of reconciliation," he said.

Angering some activists, the government announced that the memorial 
would be situated alongside a military field near the presidential 
compound, not inside the universally admired historic Chapultepec 
Park as originally proposed. The army and navy have been the bulwarks 
of the fight against the cartels, but they have also been 
increasingly mired in human rights abuses, including torture and murder.

The erection of memorials is often controversial. Citizens, survivors 
and families of the dead argued passionately over the design, scope 
and placement of the memorials marking the Vietnam War and the Sept. 
11 attacks. But in those cases, the commemorations came long after 
the bloodshed was over.

Mexico, by contrast, remains gripped by the violence that this 
monument will mark. It is an achingly inconclusive phenomenon.

Alvaro Vazquez Mantecon, who produced one of Mexico's most important 
memorials, one paying homage to students massacred by government 
troops in 1968, said the drug war monument could play the important 
role of "giving dignity to victims who were often criminalized by 
authorities." (Because so many dead were not identified, the 
authorities often lumped them all together as villains.)

But Vazquez added in comments to the Reforma newspaper that he wasn't 
sure the memorial furthered the kind of understanding that was needed.

Miranda de Wallace said discussions of whether the monument would be 
engraved with names - and how to choose them - would be held this 
month by a 10 member committee from citizen organizations. "That is 
the most complicated part," she said, acknowledging that she would 
not want her son's name alongside that of a cartel hit man.

Mauricio Rivero Borrell, an architect who headed the committee that 
selected the winning design, said loved ones would be allowed to 
place candles and flowers to honor specific victims but that listing 
names seemed unrealistic. "Who is the jury that decides that?" he 
said by telephone. "Who decides who deserves to be included and who 
doesn't deserve?"

The government of President Felipe Calderon also came under criticism 
for appearing to rush the design process, which played out in record 
time. Critics said it seemed more important to the government to 
build the monument before Calderon leaves office Dec. 1 than to 
construct the proper tribute.

Some warned against another fiasco like the monument saluting 
Mexico's bicentennial. The Pillar of Light was finished nearly a year 
and a half after the anniversary, with a price tag three times the 
original projected cost. It is now a widely lampooned tower of quartz 
plates, a lightning rod for criticism of the Calderon administration. 
Calderon was also attacked by Sicilia and others for approving the 
war-victims memorial even as he was vetoing a law that would have 
provided economic, legal and medical assistance to the same 
community. The administration said the law failed to spell out the 
responsibilities of local governments; a challenge to the veto has 
been lodged in the Supreme Court.

The government said it was standing by its plan to build the memorial 
alongside the military field, Campo Marte, squeezed up against a busy 
highway. It said the selection process involved many civil-society 
groups (though it didn't mention the dissenters).

"In a democracy, we respect the opinions of various actors," Interior 
Secretary Alejandro Poire said at a news conference last week.

Sicilia, at his own news conference, said a memorial that did not 
incorporate the necessary soul-searching would end up hiding "this 
national tragedy ... as in so many mass graves."

He and his followers said they would build their own monument.

"The memorial," Sicilia said, "is a process of examining what 
happened, how they died and why ... a process that has not even begun."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom