Diego Luna and Mexican actors seek empathy for drug war victims
By MANUEL RUEDA
Channel: Latin American Affairs
A group of well known Mexican actors, including the internationally acclaimed Diego Luna, launched an ad campaign on Monday, that is calling on people in Mexico and elsewhere to empathize with victims of the war on drugs, and to support their struggle for justice and peace.
The campaign, called En los Zapatos del Otro or “In Someone Else’s Shoes,” exposes Mexicans to video and radio ads in which professional actors, speaking in the first person, narrate the chilling testimonies of Mexico’s drug war victims and also talk about what the victims feel when they are in a march, seeking justice from government authorities.
In Mexico, where the general population has become somewhat desensitized to regular news of beheadings, murders, and shootings, and where activists accuse the government of ignoring victims or labeling some of them as mere criminals, the campaign is one of several ongoing efforts that seeks to generate solidarity between drug war victims and the general population.
“My name is Javier Sicilia,” says actor Daniel Gimenez in one of the video ads, “my son Juan Francisco was brutally assassinated, along with Julio Cesar Romero Jaime, Luis Antonio Romero Jaime, and Gabriel Anejo Escalera”
“They are victims of a war which has put this country in a state of emergency,” says the ad, which was made by a group of well-known cinema and soap opera actors that call themselves El Grito Mas Fuerte, or the Strongest Shout.
According to El Grito’s website, the ads respond to a collective desire among the actors to support the work of poet Javier Sicilia and his Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a group of drug war victims, which has held marches around the country, seeking justice for victims and an end to the government’s bloody confrontation with the country’s cartels.
“We want to give voice to the victims of violence in Mexico, and at the same time generate awareness (of the problem) amongst citizens, so that we can all become agents of change,” says El Grito’s webpage.
More than 45,000 Mexicans have died from drug related violence since 2006, including Javier Sicilia’s son, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in the city of Cuernavaca.
Sicilia, who became a well known activist after his son’s death, said he was moved by the actors’ support during a concert on Monday, in which the campaign was launched.
“If we do not think of each other as brothers and if we do not recognize that someone else’s pain is also our pain…we will never be able to fight crime together” he said.
