Peaceful steps to defang gangs

For Caribbean leaders gathering this week to discuss how to end rule by gangs in Haiti, a lesson might be found from a truce brokered in Mexico between warring drug cartels over the weekend: The best solution may lie in discerning the motives of those caught up in violence.

There are people in gangs and drug cartels who “no longer want war, they no longer want to be killing each other,” said Salvador Rangel, a retired Catholic bishop in Guerrero, the southern Mexican state where the two cartels overlap. It is crucial, he told The Associated Press, “to take advantage of that desire to bring peace.”

Across Latin America, countries are trying different tactics against a rise of nonstate violent groups. In Colombia, for example, the city of Buenaventura has become the center for government efforts to neutralize armed militias and other illicit groups since the two predominant gangs there declared a truce in 2022. The city’s homicide rate has dropped while civic participation among women and youth has increased. As a visiting delegation of the United Nations Security Council noted, “Lack of economic and educational opportunities continue to make young people vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups,” but they are also learning to see themselves as “not only victims, but also agents of change.”

In Mexico, the truce in Guerrero arose from efforts by local religious leaders to break the violence and extortion disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens. Four bishops held meetings with leaders from the two cartels. It seemed neither side was willing to budge, so the bishops backed off. Then, on Saturday, the groups announced a breakthrough on their own.

They haven’t said what changed their minds. But as a 2013 InSight Crime study of gang truces in Latin America noted, agreement reached between rival illicit groups – either directly or through civic mediators – is often built on establishing enough trust to promote further confidence-building and “verification of commitments.”

In Haiti, which has been without an elected government since the 2021 assassination of its prime minister, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect estimates that 2 million people live in areas controlled by more than 200 different criminal groups. International efforts to send a peacekeeping force are aimed at restoring calm so that elections can be held.

More countries in Latin America realize that challenging gangs with either arms or arrests does not always work. “You cannot confront violence with violence, you cannot put out fire with fire,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said this month. “You must confront evil by doing good.”