“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
Video translation is as follows:
I’m aware that “in the beginning – as James Hillman says – it was not the Word, but war”, I am not one of those romantics, those idealists who imagine perpetual peace.
I know that violence has accompanied and shaped the history of mankind.
I know that homeland, property, power, money, religion, ideology often lead us, with terrifying ease, to take up arms and kill each other.
I know war; I have lived it and there is nothing I detest more.
I know that once the killing is unleashed it generates a collective frenzy that is almost impossible to stop.
I know that when this fascination with death finally ceases, it is always too late and that, at the very moment of ending an armed conflict, the next one is already brewing.
And yet, even though I am convinced that this is an impossible task to accomplish successfully, I want, I search, I seek, I try, I fight tooth and nail for peace.
I do not want to see more people fall in combat or, worse still, to see them swell the endless list of so-called collateral casualties.
I am sick and tired of bodies torn apart by shrapnel.
Of the pain of the mothers.
Of the terror of that child who in the Mexican neighborhood, back in San Salvador, said: “Let’s go, mommy, they are bombing us”.
I hate war and curse the infamous ones who, without even hearing the bullets whistle, disguise themselves as generals, and while they raise flags stained with innocent blood, they order others to go and kill and die.
I curse those shoddy marshals, those warlords who, in order to stabilize the power they have usurped against the will of the people, impose hell on their peoples.
I have nothing more than this against Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.
I do not hate him.
I am not obsessed with him.
I don’t live clinging to the past.
I have memory, dignity, hunger for the future and love this country and its people.
This is why I consider it necessary and urgent that he be tried and punished.
This is why I welcome the fact that Genaro García Luna has been singled out in the trial and I hope that the U.S. government and its prosecutors do their job well and, if they have already named him, do not fail to indict him.
It is not a minor thing that this government, before which Calderón bowed down and under whose orders he imposed a war as bloody as useless, has brought a man to testify before a judge to point the finger at him.
It is not a minor thing that this same government seeks the conviction of Genaro García Luna, who was his friend, confidant, secretary of state, right-hand man and strategist.
Calderon has been left helpless by the foreign power thanks to which he governed. He thought he was the favorite son. He was only the executor of the extermination orders that Washington usually gives to those it considers “its sons of bitches”.
The same thing happened to Somoza, to the Argentine generals and to Pinochet.
On the other hand, the drug cartels that Calderon and Garcia Luna promised to destroy became -at the point of massacres and summary executions- bloodthirsty combat forces and the evidence indicates that both he and Garcia Luna -whether or not they were proven to have received bribes from the drug cartels- made with US aid, with war and death, an enormous dirty business.
Nor will Calderón succeed in another primary task; guaranteeing the submission of the Mexican people and the surrender of our natural resources to foreign companies.
With him and in this betrayal for which the Americans supported them, Enrique Peña Nieto also failed.
The neighbor escaped from the hands of the United States; we Mexicans made the decision to put an end to the neoliberal regime, defend our sovereignty, transform the country and build peace.
Over there, in his hideout in Spain, Felipe Calderón must be trembling, and rightly so; who, despite his terrible love for war, is today, for his bosses, one more of the many infamous disposable people who have served them.