Breaking Down Borders

SUNLAND PARK, N.M. — More than 400 people from the U.S. and Mexico met at the border fence Saturday in a display of solidarity with people affected by violence in Juárez.

The demonstrators passed water and notes across the fence until the Border Patrol told them no objects could cross the border.
Event organizer Christina Garcia said UTEP students and professors organized A Day of Action/Un Día de Acción to allow Americans to come into contact with the people in Mexico affected by the violence,.

“I know we already hear it every single day when we turn on the TV or we read it in the newspaper, but it’s important for us to see the faces of all the people it’s affected,” she said.
Garcia said the students felt the demonstration was necessary to show that people in El Paso had not forgotten the violence in Juárez.

“It’s a way for people to not become desensitized, and not to ignore it, and if this is the only thing we can do, we’ll just keep doing it,” she said. “In Mexico they go to a protest and they scream, and they say, ‘If they can’t hear us screaming, we’ll scream louder.’”

UTEP student Ana Morales said the activist group that organized the protest started with a few students and a professor. She said the group mobilized hundreds of people through use of social networking and the media.

“It’s completely a grassroots organization,” she said. “So, we went from there. We put ideas together, and we started networking, contacting people from the classroom, then we started collaborating with organizations and students, which helped us out a lot.”

Some demonstrators fasted during the demonstrations, as a sort of hunger strike to protest the violence in Juárez., and those fasting wore surgical masks.

Peace and Justice Sin Fronteras member Roberto Rivera, who participated in the fast, said about 15 people in the U.S. and 40-50 people in Juárez fasted for 27 hours.

“We’re fasting, and we’re praying to a higher God, a higher spirit, that the violence will stop. It’s our solidarity with people in Juárez,” he said. “It’s another way of nonviolent protest that we can do. We believe in nonviolence and we’re promoting our agenda.”