Sicilia's son, 24-year-old Juan Francisco, was killed with six friends on March 28 in the city of Cuernavaca, where the Sicilias lived and which was until recently a peaceful town known for its artists. The young men had a dispute with members of a narco gang in a local bar. When they left, they were abducted and strangled. Shortly after, Sicilia announced that he no longer has poetry within him. He has since came to lead a popular movement against the drug war, beginning with a demonstration in Cuernavaca, then a rally attended by tens of thousands in the capital, and now this latest, daring caravan to the northern border. He and his loose coalition of activist groups cast their movement as civil resistance aimed at reforming the corrupt police, courts, and political elites that, Sicilia argues, doomed the militarized drug war strategy from the moment President Felipe Calderon rushed into it in late 2006.

Mexican history is replete with plaza-packing but ultimately ineffective protest movements. The country's machine politics are famously adept at co-opting uprisings. This one might be just a cathartic outlet for people in pain -- as valuable and moving as that plainly is for the many who need it. "The problem is that in Mexico the elected officials effectively act with impunity," George Grayson, a specialist in Mexico at the College of William and Mary, told me. "There really is no way the people of Mexico are able to hold their elected officials accountable."

But some recent polls show a majority believing their country is losing the drug war to the narcos. Sicilia's supporters cite the 40,000 people killed and 10,000 missing since Calderon launched the war four and a half years ago. A study in this month's issue of the Mexican magazine Nexos shows the violence not only increasing in volume but spreading to new parts of the country. In the city of Monterrey, for example, killings linked to organized crime rose from 22 in 2009 to 178 last year. Next year's presidential elections are likely to increase debate over how to handle the security crisis.

Sicilia's "Citizens Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity" is aimed primarily at consoling victims and at making their pain public, despite the government's occasional implications that those dying are criminals. He has vividly captured a moment of national anguish. At rallies, housewives, teachers, laborers, and lawyers nervously wept through what were often gripping, impromptu narratives about kidnapping and death. The villains included criminals as well as the security forces that are often complicit, corrupt, or worse.

In Monterrey, a refined city punctuated by gleaming office towers where the rally began with a reading of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," a middle-aged woman took the stage to describe her last conversation with her son, Andres. He called from a road trip out of town to say he'd been stopped about 15 minutes earlier by local police who'd harassed him and demanded his ID. A U.S. citizen, he produced his passport and they replied, "What else do you have?" The police took some pesos and made him leave his car behind and ride away with a friend. But Andres, telling his mother over the phone that he could see the police still following him, started to panic. That was months ago; she hasn't heard from him since. "I ask you all, and Mr. Sicilia, if anyone has seen my son," she said, her voice rising between her sobs. "For pity's sake, tell me because I feel like I'm going to die if I don't see him," she yelled. "I went to the police but they don't pay any attention to me. Nobody pays any attention to me!"