Fernando Suarez del Solar

Fernando Suárez del Solar (born December 8, 1955) is a Mexican-American peace activist.

Life
Suárez was born in Tenango del Aire in the State of Mexico, approximately 50 km to the southeast of Mexico City. He grew up in Mexico City and the city of Puebla where he attended several schools including the Universidad Militar Latino Americana; he eventually studied law at the UNAM.

His father was a high-ranking government official in the Mexican government from the late 1950s into the early 1970s.

Mr. Suárez moved his family to Tijuana after his father's death. It was near the border on the San Diego side that his son was approached by U.S. military recruiters who suggested that military service would allow him to pursue a career in law enforcement. Despite having different dreams for his son, the Suárez family relocated in 1999 to Escondido, California so that his son could attend high school and enlist in the U.S. Marines as a "green-card soldier." Mr. Suárez became a U.S. citizen on 3 July 1997.

His son, then a 20 year old U. S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal, Jesús Alberto Suárez del Solar Navarro, died in Iraq on March 27, 2003, the first soldier of Mexican origin and the fifth Hispanic soldier killed in the invasion of Iraq. It was a this point that Mr. Suárez founded the Guerrero Azteca for Peace Project, an antiwar initiative promoting peace and alternatives to the military. He traveled to Iraq in December 2003, visiting the place where his son died after stepping on a cluster bomb that had been dropped by U.S. forces.

In 2006, he led a anti-war march from Tijuana to San Francisco, modeled after the Peregrinación (Pilgrimage/March) to Sacramento led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union in 1966. He was an active supporter of Latino/a active duty military members such as Pablo Paredes and Camilo Mejía, who protested against the war. He continues his work for peace and veterans' rights to this day. In 2020, he joined a group of Gold Star families with an Open Letter to protest Mr. Trump's mistreatment in the media of Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan.