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12 December 2007
Better Education for Youth Cuts Crime in Central America
Reality show helps assimilate ex-gang members into society
Miami -- A comprehensive approach that includes better education for at-risk young people is needed to cut high crime rates in Central America and the Caribbean, according to experts, who say crime in Central America and the Caribbean has become worse, despite anti-crime programs by the region’s governments.
Identified triggers to the region’s increasing crime rates are income inequality, easy access to guns and a young underemployed or unemployed population. A May U.N. report found that crime and violence have emerged in recent years as major obstacles to attracting new investment in Central America and the Caribbean.
Diana Pardo, an analyst with the Miami consulting firm Newlink Political, told USINFO that no issue has more effect on the region’s stability and development than crime. Pardo, who participated in a panel discussion on crime at the December 3-5 Miami Conference on the Caribbean Basin, says that only about 1.5 percent of the region’s gross domestic product is used for education programs, compared to much higher percentages for law enforcement.
“Education is fundamental” for cutting crime rates, said Pardo. She said that in most Central American and Caribbean countries the quality of education is poor and many “kids don’t even know how to read and write.”
Pardo said at the panel discussion that an “emphasis should be made on programs designed to avoid the high dropout rates” from school that afflict much of the region.
She also said the region’s criminal justice system needs to become “more transparent and efficient.”
A major objective on this issue, Pardo said, is to “strengthen the penitentiary system” to stop overcrowding in jails, “improve living conditions in prisons and find better rehabilitation programs.”
Pardo said most prisons in the region are crowded to more than 125 percent of capacity. El Salvador has the most severe prison overcrowding, averaging 169 percent of capacity, she said.
CENTRAL AMERICAN GANGS AN INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Youth gangs continue to impede progress in the Central American region, but the crisis does not stop there.
Susan Kaufman Purcell, who moderated the panel discussion in Miami, told USINFO that the “maras [gangs] are not just a domestic problem” in that region. Rather, “they increasingly are becoming involved in criminal ventures that go beyond the confines of Central America, providing services to international drug cartels and to ‘coyotes’ that are engaged in facilitating illegal immigration,” said Purcell, who heads the University of Miami’s Center for Hemispheric Policy.
Purcell, a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1980 to 1981, said “there is not yet evidence of [gangs’] involvement in international terrorism, but since the nature and scope of their illegal activities are constantly evolving, such a development cannot be ruled out.”
Regardless, the “maras constitute a serious challenge to the Central American countries in which they operate, due to weak political institutions and inadequate economic resources to meet the challenge they pose,” she said.
Harold Sibaja, from Washington-based Creative Associates International Inc., briefed the panel on his group’s strategy to become “creative” and approach crime as a “security issue that had to be addressed with a social approach.”
In 2006, Sibaja said, his group put together a television reality show in which 10 former gang members in Guatemala lived together in a house for 10 days. There, they worked out a business plan to establish a car wash and a shoe-repair business.
Sounding like a hard-scrabble form of the American TV reality show The Apprentice, the Guatemalan version called Desafío 10 [Challenge 10] offered an exciting way to rehabilitate ex-gang members into society, said Sibaja.
He said the program’s goal was to “sensitize” viewers to the cruel reality that gangs offer young people an “alternative to their dysfunctional families and other bad circumstances.” Rehabilitated gang members, he said, “need a chance, an opportunity to become responsible citizens.”
The show also advertised to the private sector that former gang members have potential as “wage earners and would-be consumers,” said Sibaja.
José Garzon, from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which helped fund the show along with private businesses, said Desafío 10 “put a human face” on gang members, a strategy that had “never been done before.”
Garzon, a democracy and governance officer for USAID’s Guatemala office, said on the agency’s Web site that the show sought to introduce the Guatemalan public “to the idea of rehabilitation, not jail or doing away with gang members, but [to] bring about a positive solution. We’re trying to make the public aware that there are other solutions [to the gang problem] out there.”
More information about Desafío 10 is available on the USAID Web site.
The full text of the U.N. report Crime and Development in Central America is on the organization’s Web site.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
