He arrived with a friend, and though he left his trademark wide-brimmed hat and beige vest at home, he still garnered attention among the half dozen people sipping their coffees. As we chatted, one man patted Sicilia on the shoulder, telling him to keep up the struggle. The circumstances that plunged Sicilia into a life of activism are tragic. On March 28, 2011, his son Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega was murdered along with six others in Temixco, Morelos, just south of Mexico City. The seven bodies were found inside a Honda Civic. Sicilia, a poet, vowed he would never write another verse, and began a national campaign known as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, that carried out marches, caravans, and events throughout Mexico and the United States. Sicilia places the blame for his son’s murder squarely on the drug war strategy carried out by Felipe Calderón, and says that had drug trafficker Arturo Beltran Leyva not been murdered in 2009, his son would still be alive.[1] “I’m sure that if Beltran Leyva was still in Cuernavaca, if they hadn’t killed him, my son wouldn’t be dead,”
