Thank you for joining us and welcome to this panel. Sorry, hello. Hi, thanks for joining us and welcome to this panel on urban violence and cross-border criminal activity, a new challenge for peace building. Perhaps maybe not a new challenge, but one that we're seeking to address more comprehensively and really get to the bottom of. We have a fantastic group of panelists here for you. And to introduce myself, I'm Fiona Mangan, Senior Program Officer at the Rule of Law Center here. And I'm really looking forward to the panelists because I've been looking at this from a very different region. I've been focusing on looking at trafficking and organized crime in post-conflict Libya. And one of the things that sort of we're seeing there is violence and criminal economic hubs linking the periphery to violence in urban centers. But also, and I think this is interesting comparing some of our research to some of the analysis that's out there. What we would see is that violence that's often perceived as between pro and anti-Qadhafi groups in the post-revolution period really, actually when you look at it, boils down to, according to our research, disruption of and fight for criminal markets. And the perception that it is between pro and anti-Qadhafi is understandable because often what you're talking about is those who had privileged access to those markets under Qadhafi, being seen as the pro-Qadhafi element, and then many who have now acquired huge amounts of firepower in the post-revolution period, disrupting those lanes and gaining more access to markets. Another dynamic that we're seeing there is a huge growth in the use of drugs by the community, which wasn't as big a dynamic before the revolution, it was relatively small. And that teamed with the huge prevalence of weapons is a recipe for another type of urban violence. But I want to pass over to the panelists now. We're going to change the order a little bit, have Todd Robinson go first, then if it's okay with you guys, Enrique Ruig, Robert Brenerman, and then finally ending with Ambassador Agatha. So to introduce Todd Robinson, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at State Department. Prior to his assignment, Mr. Robinson was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. He has previously also served in Barcelona, Spain, to run an Albanian, a whole host of other missions. Mr. Robinson is actually a journalist before he entered Foreign Service and a graduate of Georgetown University's Foreign Service program. I'll hand over to Mr. Robinson. And I'm going to start out by apologizing to tell you all I'm not an expert in gang violence or violence at all, which I think is a good thing. But I would consider myself, after having lived in places like Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Albania, certainly I have seen the effects of violence and gang violence. And so maybe consider myself a certainly an interested observer. The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement handles basically law enforcement, training, capacity building, judicial training, capacity building. We work very much with corrections, both training and capacity building around the world. All of that in support of citizen security. We are also very much engaged in fighting networks, transnational organized crime networks. And a lot of that we saw, I saw a lot of a lot of our really good work being done in what we call the northern tier El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. And we're also very much engaged in places like Mexico, for instance. In this hemisphere, I should also back up and say, right now the areas I cover Africa in the Middle East. When I started in this job, I covered Latin America, Africa in the Middle East. So I've had over the almost three years that I've been doing this, a pretty good chance to see a broad range of the types of networks, criminal networks, gang networks that are out there. And the kinds of responses both in the United States, but also with our European partners, the kinds of responses we have to fighting, combating these types of networks. A large part of that response, of course, is building the capacity of the people who are actually suffering from these transnational organized crime networks. Building their capacity to fight them on their own. We, as I mentioned, we work globally with a number of different partners nationally. So we work with our European partners. We work with NGOs. We work with international organizations. UNODC, for instance, is one of our great partners around the world in terms of capacity building and training. In the Western Hemisphere, we generally have three major initiatives going on and two, what I would call legacy initiatives. The two legacy initiatives are our programs in Peru and our programs in Colombia. The Bureau in the late 80s or 90s was really stood up as the Bureau of International Narcotics Matters. And its sole purpose was the establishment of Plan Colombia. And so we branched out quite a bit from that. We're now in 80 countries around the world and doing everything from training police to training prosecutors. We have demand reduction programs around the world. So those are the two large legacy programs. We have three, what I would say are central initiatives going on in the Western Hemisphere. MEDIDA, obviously, our program with Mexico, which is enormous and has had, I think, overall an incredibly positive effect on fighting transnational organized crime in Mexico, number one. But also establishing a relationship with the country that's so important to us. We have conversations today with our law enforcement counterparts in Mexico that we would never have had 10, 15 years ago. And I would credit our MEDIDA initiative with allowing us to do that. We have the Central American Regional Security Initiative, CARSI, where we're largely focused on what I would call the Northern Tier El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, but which has also expanded. So we're doing maritime security in Costa Rica. We're doing intelligence and evidence based investigations in Panama. We're focused largely on things like gang violence and counter narcotics in Guatemala, Honduras as well. And community policing in all three El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. And then the third major initiative is CBSI, Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. We fully expect and we're already seeing signs as we've had success in Colombia and Peru. And we are having, I think, greater success in capacity building and training in Central America and Mexico. We fully expect the criminal networks to go back to their old roots, the original roots, through the Caribbean. We are hoping that we can get a jump on that and do some training in capacity building there. The problem, of course, in the, well, a lot of problems, but one of the major problems in the Caribbean is just the small population. So, you know, if you take 20 police officers from one of the islands in the Caribbean, you might be taking a third of their police force for training. And that's very hard to do. I just want to quickly mention our West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative. And I mentioned West Africa because we already know there are direct links between the criminal networks of the Western Hemisphere through West Africa, in the Sahel, in the Maghreb. One of the reasons we consider our program in Colombia such a success is because today Colombia is a net exporter of security. They are helping us train law enforcement prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, judges in West Africa. They are bringing West African authorities to train in Colombia. And we think that's a great thing. We are encouraging them. We are working actively with them. We have a number of components to our West Africa Security Initiative. I can talk about that a little later, but a little more in depth. But I would say one of the areas that we're certainly focusing on is maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea. And we are also heavily, closely working with our DEA counterparts to stand up vetted units in key African countries so that we can really build a good framework for doing investigations and prosecutions in West Africa and making sure that we can have some confidence in the agencies that we're working with. So our really close collaboration with DEA is very important. It has worked really well in the Western Hemisphere and we are following that path in West Africa. I think I'm going to stop there and let some other people speak and then we can talk more in depth later. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Enrique Rigue. Enrique is a citizen security specialist and coordinator at USAID for Central America Regional Security Initiative, where he oversees programs focused on gang prevention strategies and preventing youth crime and violence. He has over 18 years of experience working on democracy and governance, conflict prevention resolution, and humanitarian assistance. And his background is in MA in International Relations from American University. Great. Thank you very much. And thank you to the Alliance for Peacebuilding for the invitation to be here today. What I thought I would do in the seven to ten minutes that I have for this presentation is just quickly walk through the context of what USAID is currently working on in Central America and Mexico. Talk a little bit about the challenges facing youth in the region and the reason I'm picking that population group is because they're the main beneficiaries of a lot of the programs that USAID implements under CARSI and Medida, which Todd just referred to as part of our citizen security strategy in the Latin American region. I'll talk a little bit about how USAID views violence and how we come to it and sort of why we do the things we do. And then I'll just conclude quickly with some of the approaches that we're currently implementing that might have some relevancy to you all here in the peacebuilding field. So really quickly, just in terms of context, I was at a presentation recently by Sergio Fajardo, who's the governor of Antiochia, Colombia, and was the mayor of Medellin, a city that had a lot of success with dealing with the issue of violent crime. And he framed the challenges facing Latin America in this way, which I found very useful, I think, for this discussion. So the way he described it was three things that are facing the region now, and that the first one being social inequality. We know that the region suffers from the largest inequality of any region in the world by studies done by the World Bank. It's also a region that is plagued by violence, the Northern Triangle, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, having some of the highest homicide rates of any countries in the world. And then, of course, the issue of corruption, which permeates many of the institutions in the region, largely due to the effect of drug trafficking and transnational organized crime. I'm going to pass over that next slide and come back to it. And so the way that Sergio described the challenge in the region now for youth is that they're facing this giant wall of social inequality as depicted here in this picture. And so these youth who have really limited educational opportunities, limited job opportunities are really left out of development in many of these countries. And so, you know, they're sort of looking over this wall trying to get in and there's really not a whole lot of opportunities and nobody really there to help them do that. On top of that limiting factor, that giant wall of social inequality we have, these youth are exposed to many risk factors that make them more vulnerable to get involved in criminal behavior, or gangs. And these risk factors are based on years of studies done here in the U.S. and abroad, longitudinal studies of gang involvement. So they include these that you see here on the list, everything from negative peer influence, which is a major risk factor for many of these youth. Basically the people who you hang out with, of course lack of parental supervision, kids who are out all night hanging out, drinking, drug abuse. Another big one, generational gang influence. We see this one cropping up more in Central America. Guilt neutralization, which basically means I steal something from you because you're rich enough and you won't miss it. Critical life events, often kids who have lost their parents or immigrated to the U.S. and then impulsive risk taking, which we know that adolescents are inclined to this one. And so given those risk factors and the wall of social inequality, unfortunately sometimes there's this window of illegality. So in the window right now in Central America tends to be pretty large. So you've got youth who without opportunities for jobs and climate exposed to individual risk factors are able to crawl through this window of illegality into this world of illegality. And basically they're exposed to a whole treasure trove of illicit things from involvement in gangs to extortion, drug trafficking, violence with guns, money, you name it. It's a world of bad things. And so what we're trying to do with many of the programs that USA is implementing is closing that window of illegality to make it smaller and offer to use a metaphor, a door of legality. So offering them opportunities that they can actually become part of the regular society. I'm going to go back here real quick. So unfortunately the context that we're faced with now then in Central America is this one that, as I mentioned before, Guatemala, Southern Honduras, the world's deadliest nonwar zone, highest rate of youth violence, an estimated 70,000 gang members, give or take. The vast majority of those involved in gangs and youth crime are between the ages of 15 and 24 and 25% of homicides related to organized crime and gangs. So all in all a very bad situation. Moving forward here. So this brings me to the issue of how do we then view violence at USAID and what are we trying to combat it? So there's a lot of discussion in the field about viewing violence as a public health issue. And of course I have this picture of this very giant mosquito here for you. And I wanted to use the analogy of a malaria outbreak. You know, if this mosquito were actually alive and well in here in this room and was infected with malaria and was released, what would you all do? Run out the room. Maybe some of you who are taking anti-malarial drugs would stay here because you're protected, you're inoculated.  But we know that violence acts as an infectious disease. It's contagious. It spreads. It can reach epidemic proportions. But we also know that it can be prevented and treated. And so that's sort of the context that we're facing now in the region. There's a whole group of youth as depicted at the bottom of this pyramid who are basically living in hotspot communities, maybe not exposed to as many risk factors, but by nature where they live, they're exposed to a lot of violence. And so that group right there are candidates for a whole host of prevention type activities that we're currently trying to implement at USAID. As you move up the pyramid, the group shrinks, but now these are kids who might be more at risk of getting involved in gangs or other criminal activity. And they might require a different kind of treatment approach. That might be different from the first group at the bottom of the pyramid. You know, either working with their families or identifying specific risk factors and trying to address those. And then as you move up the pyramid to the second level, you've got now active gang members. Now, these are obviously folks who are already involved heavily in criminal activity. Might be candidates for reentry programs or intervention programs to help them get out. But again, requiring a special kind of treatment approach. And then finally at the top of the pyramid, you have those that are already seriously infected that are in the prison system. You know, might be in there for life doing 20 years who knows, exposed to others who are also infected. And so that's a group that obviously is a target of law enforcement and usually are chronic offenders. Now, as you see in the pyramid, you know, the rise in crime increases as you go up the pyramid in terms of the level of exposure to risk factors. And those who are committing more serious crimes. So for the most part, a lot of us in the donor community are really working at the bottom of the pyramid. You know, really trying to prevent these youths from getting involved in the first place. But as we see our programs evolving, we're starting to understand more and based on lessons here in the U.S. In particular places like Los Angeles, for example, that there's probably more that we need to do in the second and third level in terms of those youth who are already exposed to high levels of risk and those are already involved in gangs. And so we're looking at ways that we can address that moving forward with our activities. And it looks like I'm out of time, so I'll, okay. But I think I'll conclude there and leave it open for questions. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm hoping we can maybe pull apart some more of those metaphors during the questions and answers session. Our next speaker is Robert Breneman. Robert Breneman is the assistant professor of sociology at St. Michael's College. And his research very much focuses on these issues of youth violence and gang exit. His book, Homies and Hermannas, God and Gangs in Central America, looks at gang members and joining the church. He's currently conducting follow-up research to gauge the long-term impact of the decision to leave gangs by way of the church. Okay, so Sharon gave me some questions to orient what I was going to say. And so I tried to build my comments pretty carefully according to the questions that we were given. I'm going to try to hit those pretty closely. And then I'm happy to talk about other things in details later. The question is how violence, how we have seen violence evolve over the past two years in my area, like the other people on this panel is Central America, specifically Northern Central America. What's called the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Salvador, and Honduras. Violence has continued for the past two decades, but really it's changed in form and changed largely in motive as well. It's gone from being the place we think about Civil War, the place where Civil Wars happened, the place where violence was intense, but largely ideological, political, and driven by big groups, subversives, state mechanisms. In the last two decades, that violence has not gone away, lethal violence has not gone away in Central America, but it has changed enormously. It is now largely entrepreneurial. It's ideological only in the most ephemeral sense. It's really gone from being political and ideologically inspired to being entrepreneurially inspired. And true, as Fiona was mentioning earlier, if we scratched at the surface of some of those ideological conflicts back in the 1980s and early 1990s, we would probably find a lot of entrepreneurial violence behind, or motives behind the political wars, Civil Wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. But there was this, there were large narratives about reforming society or maintaining the status called keeping society safe from communism, etc. That's what drove the violence in the 1980s and early 90s. Today it's largely entrepreneurial, instigated largely by essentially three groups of actors. Narco-trafficking, the drug cartels, organized crime, and gang violence. My area specifically is gang violence, but I want to make sure and make it clear at the beginning that gang violence is only one piece of the violence in Central America and probably not the greatest contributor, probably not the largest contributor to violence in Central America, but certainly a violent contributor. But like narco-trafficking and organized crime, it is largely entrepreneurial, not just driven by entrepreneurs, but it shares that with the other two. The impact of gang violence is felt obviously most in urban, marginal communities, impoverished urban communities, and the impact is essentially in three ways. It's lethal, it's social, and it's economic. It's lethal in the sense that bodies turn up. A lot of the gang violence is between gang members, probably the majority of gang violence is between gang members, but gang members also target other members of the community, taxi drivers, bus drivers, homeowners. And that kind of violence was largely developed in the 1990s as gangs, which had been around in Central America for 30 years, were transformed from being locally focused and locally named to be coming to affiliating with these what we call transnational gangs of Mara Salvatrucha and Mara de Siocho, the 18th Street and the MS-13. Now those affiliations are often largely symbolic and not deeply structured. I'll get to that in a minute, but essentially that transformative period in the 1990s came with access to weapons and access to drugs. Oftentimes, because of small jobs that were done for the drug cartels that were paid in kind with drugs that then needed to be monetized, and that happened then in the local urban community as gang members sought a local market for their payment. They also developed models for extortion, what's called impuesto de guerra, the war tax. Gangs developed ways of making money off their neighbors, essentially charging a tax for security in their community, especially targeting transportationists, taxi drivers, bus drivers, and small business owners. That's the economic impact that gang violence has on their communities. It's essentially a negative economic tax paid by the people who can least afford it. Families who have a little tienda corner store that is one way of squeaking by. Many of those families had to close the tienda or sell a lot less because people are afraid to go out. Taxi drivers are afraid either can't make money anymore or no longer serve this community because of the fear of gangs. So that's the economic impact. The social impact is families in these communities hunkering down, afraid to go out at night. It's interesting, I study gangs in churches in Central America. There are quite a number of churches that have had to move their services up earlier in the evening. Typical Pentecostal storefront church has its biggest night. Its biggest worship services are about eight o'clock in the evening on Friday and Saturday night, which is one reason why gang exit programs run by Pentecostal churches do so well because their biggest moment is at the same time as the biggest moment of the Vidaloka of the gang. So essentially if you're trying to get a gang member to leave the gang and build a stable lifestyle outside the gang, you're trying to get him to cut off his social connections, social ties to the gangs. Church five nights a week is a great way to do that. It's a way of cutting off those boundaries. But in any case, a lot of those churches are moving their service worship times up to four and five in the evening so that it doesn't, so that parishioners don't have to go home in the dark. How does it differ from civil conflict? I already mentioned a lot of the civil conflict. When we think of civil conflict, we often think of ideology of belief systems that are in contrast, whether it's sectarianism, whether it's political violence. This is largely entrepreneurial and identity building. I think what it has in common with civil conflict is that both in civil conflict and urban violence, including gang violence, economic inequality to echo something that Enrique said is a key generator, a key engine of the violence today as it was 30 years ago during the Civil War conflicts in Central America. It's just that today the groups that are responding to economic inequality rather than building large coalitions to try to overthrow the government and install a more fair and just government are looking around and saying, how can I improve the situation for me and my family right here? And the gang provides that opportunity or drug cartels provide that opportunity or getting involved with the transportistas provides us with that opportunity. We don't have to wait around for a new government to come in and try to establish over 30 years of more just society. We can do something about inequality, at least for me and my family right now. Cross-border dimensions. One, we could talk a lot about cross-border dimensions. I think early on in the research on the transnational gangs, there was a lot of emphasis on gangs, cross-borders, and they have these structures that are transnational. And there was almost the idea that some guy in a cell in San Salvador could send out an order and went all the way down to the street in San Pedro Sula Honduras. And there's all the empirical research since has really not turned up any evidence of tight hierarchical structures that cross national borders. They seem to be more franchise-like than army-like. However, one transnational impact that's come to my attention very recently is that we're seeing a vast increase in the migration of minors towards the north. And the UN just put out a report called Children on the Run. The numbers of apprehensions of minors unaccompanied by parents coming to the United States and getting apprehended by ICE has gone up by about 500 percent. In the last two years, and it's supposed to go up from 20,000 last year to perhaps 60,000 apprehended minors unattended. So you're seeing a vast exodus of minors, and many of the youth are saying that they were targeted by gangs, recruited, targeted for recruitment by gangs, or by the drug cartels. And they're fleeing. They're coming north to get away from it. It's difficult to know just how much that's driving it, but it is a factor. Are the tools we need to address urban violence different from the tools we need to address civil conflict? I would say in general, probably yes. There are some similarities that a lot is being written and talked about the truce between gangs, high-level gang leaders in El Salvador right now. It's a big debate over that. I think whatever your position on that, even if you support the truce in El Salvador at best, what the truce between gangs can do is open up some space to do some positive peace building on the ground in communities face to face. That's what we have to do. And whatever the truce, whatever improvements in security the truce seems to have brought, at least in the short term, will evaporate in the long term if we don't use these moments to build peace on the ground in communities face to face with local leaders, local church leaders, municipal leaders, business leaders to work together to provide opportunity for young people to be able to constructively build an identity for the future. Thank you very much. It's fascinating. And we'll move next to Ambassador Agueta. Ambassador is the permanent representative for Guatemala to the OAS, co-author and implementer of the widely recognized ESNA methodology, a conflict resolution method that was instrumental in peace processes in Guatemala and El Salvador. Also author of Enlightened Descent, a leadership methodology for peace building, consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, advisor at Harvard Center for Conflict Resolution, scholar and practitioner in residents of Tafts, and many, many other things. Ambassador, we're looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much. After saying thanks for having me here, I would honestly like to say that I would rather continue to listen than to talk. It's been very interesting listening to my fellow panelists. I would like to apologize for not following with the discipline that you did on the questions. The truth of the matter is that I never got to see the questions. But I did get the topic, which is about peace building and the challenges for peace building. So I would like to then talk about, you know, the, we missed one slide there, I think. How do we go back to this slide? Is it there? Okay. In any case, in an oversimplification, we could say that the present and future challenges for peace building are based on extreme ideology or religious fanatics that live large segments of population excluded, impeded from advancing and protecting their interests, frustrated or in fear, and they resort to violence. And or power or economic gain. Vested interest groups, and this is something that I please want you to pay attention to because it is happening in this country too. This is not only happening in the third world. Vested interest groups capturing the national decision making processes and do the influencing legislation to serve their interest legalizing illegitimate actions and do the influencing state resource allocation, producing and provoking corruption. And again, large segments of population excluded and impeded from advancing or protecting their interest. And again, it's happening here too. And that is a big, huge challenge. Now without in mind, I want you to take a look at the general pattern of conflict. Exclusion is, as we have heard, the underlying cause of conflict. It has two different types of way impacting human beings. On the practical side, it is the inability to pursue one's interest. And if it is recurrent, then it leads to frustration. And if it is recurrent, it leads to violence. When there's no way that you can advance or protect your interest, you resort to violence. On the psychological side, because we are wired to be socially connected, to be excluded makes us feel vulnerable and threatened. And that makes us live in fear. And if we live in fear forever, we resort to violence to protect our lives. So protected violence produces a social pattern. And what we see in gangs, what we see in criminal activity, what we see in social conflictivity, what we're talking about is a social pattern, the way society behaves. And if it behaves long enough, it becomes part of the culture. When we talk about 30 years of wars in Central America and 30 years of exclusion, what we have is a culture of violence as a result of exclusion. And what it does produce is paranoid societies. With a generalized lack of trust, their inability to communicate with one another because there is no trust and a zero-sum mentality. Whoever advances does so at my expense. So what are the state's options to respond to violence? When there are protracted violent breakouts, governments can either repress, reward or reform. That's the universal possible responses. If you repress, you have a short-term solution and then more violence. If you reward, you invite imitation and then more violence. And if you reform, you risk political turmoil because reforming means changing the status group. And that means affecting the interest of vested interest groups that have control of national resources, of the nationalization-making processes, or who are the ones who benefit from whatever the country produces. But it does have also a potential long-term stability and governance. Now, the impact of violence and insecurity. There is what economists refers to as the transaction cost. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But it does undermine the ability of experts to be competitive. In the case of Guatemala, private sector complains that it is about 9%. So transaction costs at 9% of total production cost. I guess if they paid 5% more taxes, they would probably not have to face that 9%. But that's an option. He knows them to learn from them. So here's the one thing that we need to understand. And this is something that we've learned from many, many years in Guatemala and El Salvador in trying to understand conflict. How it comes about and what are the real elements of it. And my conclusion is that conflict is inherent to human interaction. And if that is true, then it is more efficient to learn to manage it than it is to attempt to solve it. Here, I'm sounding a little crazy because most people talk about conflict resolution. From my perspective, that is pretty much a waste of time. We need to learn to manage it because it's here to stay. And conflict needs to be managed without violating human dignity. There is enough scientific proof today that a wound to your dignity produces the same type of response in your brain than a physical injury. But as a society, we are ready to attend to those who are physically hurt. But we're not ready to attend those who are psychologically hurt. And that conflict is best addressed by understanding perspectives. When you know the rationale of position or actions, you have more tolerance to it. Now, to understand perspectives, you need to be able to communicate. And that conflict resolved by consensus tends to be short-lived because it is generally power driven. And when power shifts, consensus disappears. So how do we go about dealing with these issues? We believe there's a way to do it. And we refer to it as the enabler of trust. Our natural mode of communicating and talking to one another is the debating mode of communication. And when we talk in a debating mode of communication, we talk to persuade and we listen to counterattack. Now, place that in a society that has no trust whatsoever. And we're talking about dealing with conflict in societies like Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Libya, and so many other countries where there's very little culture of communicating to solve problems. So the default position is, whatever you're doing is to hurt me. As opposed to, well, now I understand why you're doing what you did. And it was not intent to hurt me. It was only the intent to move forward your interest. So we're proposing to use the reflective mode of communication.  That would probably trigger what we refer to as the trust progression. Now, we're definitely using another version of the presentation. So, now I know. Anyway, the trust progression. The first attempt is to by talking to communicate and by listening to understand, we will be creating soft trust. At least we will create the basis to have effective communication with ourselves. The second step would be educated trust, which means once I learn why you act the way you act, why you say the things you say, why you think the way you think, then I'm beginning to build a second step in our relationship that is called educated trust. Educated in the sense that now I understand better why it is that you're acting the way you're acting. And finally, we should arrive to functional trust. Once we are at that level of communicating, we are in capacity to integrate solutions. I will take your best ideas and you will take my best ideas and we'll put them together and we will bring a solution. And with this, I'll let you be. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think now we'll move on to questions. So, we have two mics on either side of the room. Someone can rove it to you? Thank you for a very interesting panel. It seems to me that you're having violence prevention at the same time you're having crime prosecution going on. And in this country, former Mayor of Philadelphia Wilson Good has been eloquent in his work to reduce the over-incarceration of people. And the Attorney General is working on policies now in that regard. So, I'm wondering whether there is anything going on in the prison side and the prosecution side that might have relevance for us or might be flagging a whole series of other problems that you all are concerned about. Good question. And I'd like to take a minute. I do have a handout here. Maybe I should have put it on overhead, but I'm just going to pass it out. There probably aren't enough for everybody, but it does speak to that a little bit in this sense. I believe that good prosecution, careful prosecution, successful prosecution is prevention. It must be a part of crime prevention. I've been a little bit won over by this in recent years for two reasons. One, I read David Kennedy's book Don't Shoot, and I found it a compelling argument for careful, focused deterrence, not for broad brush. We're going to go out and get you if you smoke a joint on the street or have an open container or something like that. That approach, if it has ever worked, has other negative consequences that are too high. And in Central America, I think there's a really good dissertation that needs to be done comparing responses to gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and maybe Nicaragua as well. But even just those three countries that we're used to talking about as the Northern Triangle have actually had diverging strategies and diverging consequences in recent years. And I think part of the reason is because Guatemala has done a better job in the last few years of increasing its conviction rates. It doesn't mean they're sending more people to prison. What Salvador did from 2002 to 2005 with the Manaluda program under two administrations is they basically took a broad brush program and they did sweeps in neighborhoods, gang activity neighborhoods, and rounded up anybody who looked like a gang member and put them in prison. And if they could find something on them that would stick, they would keep them there. And if not, they'd let them go after a couple of days. So basically what they did was if you remember Enrique's pyramid from four up to one, they took four, three, two, one and threw them all in prison. And what happened? It's clear that if you look at the data that Salvador, more than any of the other three countries, has had an increase in the number of people, estimated number of people involved in gangs, and certainly in the number of people incarcerated, gang members, and they have a better organized gang. Because they took people from different parts of the city and the country and put them in one space together in prisons made up fully for gang members. They built new prisons. They took a mass incarceration approach like the United States did. It failed miserably. We really have to own up to that. El Salvador has not seen any good progress. Guatemala has actually seen some progress in a declining, sustainably declining homicide rate. It's not huge, but it is four years running now. And I think part of it is a better, more focused, more professionalized prosecutorial team. That's only one piece of the puzzle. But I think a good, professional, focused prosecution and policing needs to be a part of it, as well as on the ground sort of what we normally think of preventive groups. But there's no reason to think that that careful, focused prosecution is not prevention. It should be. Just to add. Yeah. I just wanted to add really quickly also that the issue of overcrowding in jails in Central America, as I mentioned now, is obviously a huge issue. Recent UNDP report for El Salvador said that the overcrowding there was at 300% over capacity. So that's obviously pretty significant. So I think something that we also need to look at is what we're doing in terms of the juvenile justice system in the region. We've been promoting reform on that issue, but also looking at diversion programs for youth who come out of these juvenile detention centers. We have a wealth of experience here in the U.S. that our own Department of Justice supports throughout the country for those juveniles who've come out of these detention centers. So, you know, alternative is to incarceration because we really have to stop that chain early on because to use the malaria metaphor. You know, again, we're mixing folks who aren't really having been infected with those who are seriously infected when we start, you know, putting juveniles who then graduate to the adult prison system. And unfortunately, what we've created now is a culture of gangs in the prison systems in Central America. And so really looking at the way that we can stop that earlier on, I think, is key to, has to be key to the strategy overall. I would just add really quickly. I think, you know, if you take the premise that what we've done in terms of incarceration in the United States has utterly failed, I would argue that we, at least on the international side, learn the lessons. We, some of the best work the United States is doing abroad is corrections reform. And if you look at a prison in Mexico today and compare it to a prison in Mexico 10 years ago, it's night and day. And those prisons are now being, will soon be internationally certified. Morocco is another example. The current head of the prison, the corrections directorate in Morocco spent nine years in Morocco, Moroccan prison. So I think he knows a little bit about what, what that's like. Morocco is, will shortly be internationally certified in corrections, and they are helping us train others in North Africa on, and that is a direct result of the training we've done with Moroccan. So I think in that respect, we are, we are doing much better jobs, same thing on prosecutions and our work with judges. But at least on the international side, and I'm only able to speak about the international side. I think we're, we're doing much better. Hi, I'm Dr. Carpenter from the University of San Diego, and I have a question for Mr. Voig, and then comments, or question for the whole panel based on something that Dr. The amount of funding that USAID gets from Merida is minute compared, even beyond Merida to the amount of the US or the military and security establishment is still receiving. So across the panel, it seems that theoretically we understand what the root causes of violence are, but when it comes to policy recommendations, we are still pouring the bulk of the money into military and security solutions which aren't working. I'm curious if you could speak to us a little bit about the political, the nature of decision making around the allocation of those resources, whether or not in your opinion they have anything to do with the kickbacks to the military industrial complex and just the political nature of how those decisions are made. And then you made the good point that gang chooses aren't an end in themselves, that they open spaces for community development, but that's only really the case if our national policymakers buy into it. The new president of El Salvador is backing away from that choose. The previous administration didn't follow through with the resources that it promised to the zones of peace that the choose included. And so I would be very grateful for your insights on how to change the national narrative. We don't talk to criminals, we don't engage with gangs. We know it can be shifted we have, you know, 20 years it took to get rid of the untrue narrative anyway that we don't talk to terrorists. But we need to change that at the policymaking level in order to do the kinds of work that you recommend. In terms of this question of the allocation of resources and the balance between military law enforcement efforts and prevention. And this is a debate that's happening here in the US and in our cities as well right in terms of finding the right balance between the suppression efforts and those on the prevention intervention reentry side so it's not new to the international realm as well. But what I would say though it's what's positive in the sense is that, you know, going back six years when my mother was involved, we've seen definitely a shift now towards governments in the region adopting prevention policies. The Mexican government has done this El Salvador Guatemala and Honduras and so there is a recognition now that this side of the equation does need to be addressed if we're going to have long term success to combat this issue. The police chiefs here in the US will say you can't arrest your way out of this problem but you can't prevent your way out of the problem either so it really has to be an integrated approach. Yes we would like to see more resources thrown at prevention because, you know, the population group that we're able to reach now is limited and if we were able to reach more we would, you know, hopefully have more long term success. But again that's the policy dialogue that's happening here in the US, it's happening with our partners but I would say again the trend is moving in a positive direction. You know, even with the private sector in Central America which has been reluctant in the past to invest in this area we're seeing now more partnerships flourishing with them and they're also investing in community based approaches to crime and violence prevention. So it's not perfect but, you know, the more education, the more sensitizing that we do on the topic I think that people start to see that obviously this has to be a picture part of it. But at the same time we know that there's, you know, there's really bad characters out there, there's transnational organized crime, there's gangs that are involved in a lot of bad stuff and so there has to be targeted suppression at them as well, right? And so that does require significant law enforcement assets as well so it's, again, it's, you know, finding the right balance I think is key to this. I'm not necessarily one's better than the other or one should get, you know, it's, so. And you're being modest because results matter as well and what we've seen in El Salvador and in Guatemala is where we do some of the great community policing that you guys are a part of. In those neighborhoods and municipalities where we do community policing, the rates of violence drop tremendously. And so hats off to you all because it's really worked. I hope my voice is going to work. I've lost it yesterday. I'm Erin Candles from the New School and I have a question. I mean, I'm sort of following the debates around inclusion in the area of peace building and civil war more than urban violence. And I'm just curious, I mean, I have to say this paradigm of entrepreneurialism is much more refreshing than grievance to or agreed obviously to explain the motives of violence. And I guess I'm just curious about this question of inclusion and one of the things you know that I keep seeing is around how much inclusion is enough like political settlements or in peace processes to actually to make a difference and how is it connected to the type of substantive and material inputs to the process, you know, what and what kinds what kinds and what types of inclusion and how much inclusion is enough to see actual results. You know, and do jobs as a measure of economic inclusion, for example, do they solve the problem. Are there sort of lots. Is there a lot of evidence emerging around this and yeah, thank you to any of you. I'd like to speak to two things and the first is that one of the reasons I talk about law enforcement and this gets back to the comment just a moment earlier is that I think it's important even when dealing with quote unquote gang violence that prosecution goes all the way up. For example, with the in Guatemala it was quite common late 2010s to the 2009 2010 the gangs were doing a lot of extorting and a couple of high level. There was a bomb on a bus that was ordered by from prison by a gang member that generated enough political will to be able to push the justice system to go all the way up the chain and follow and find out what was actually happened. And one of the things they found is that there were people in the community who were facilitating the payment of extortion business people in the community where the gangs live. In other words, gang violence isn't just gang violence, gang violence is connected to communities who either see an opportunity to make money. Or who don't trust the justice system and go to a gang member in order to perform a killing for hire because gang members are they're willing to do it those that's the skill set they have. And after all they're disposable youth and so if you want you can get rid of the person who who who did it. I had personally interviewed ex gang members who killed more than a dozen people for hire after they left the gang. In other words, and one individual in particular told me that he said you wouldn't believe the kind of middle class families that would come to me asking me to perform their dirty work for them. And I did it. He said now were those gang murders. They were they were committed by a gang member and an older gang member, but it's not just gang violence. It's this is this particular man was in Honduras. And so if you want to deal with that you've got to deal with more than just the gang members themselves and and even extortion rings gang extortion rings pay a lot of people in different places and you've got to be able to to go all the way up and out in those cases to hold those people accountable because if the gang member is killed through social cleansing someone else is going to step up and do it related to inclusion. I like to talk about respect and dignity to use a word that the ambassador used dignity is incredibly important in and one of the things violence isn't just entrepreneurially in the sense that people are after that gang members are after money. There's also a sense in which violence is a game in which I can build my identity as someone to be respected someone to be taken seriously. And when I took the pistol in the front of my pocket for the first time this is what one ex-gang member told me recalling the first time he got a weapon. He said when I took that pistol in the front of my pants for the first time people noticed me people took account of me. I became visible after being invisible in order to attract youth like him as he gets older in order to attract him to another form of life. We've got to offer him something other than just becoming a law abiding citizen that won't cut it that there's no identity in that. You know I'm a professor at a little podunk college up in Vermont but it's my place. I'm a professor. I belong to this place. This is who I am. If you take that away from me what am I? So we can't just tell gang members leave the gang and become law abiding citizens. One of the reasons that religious programs have tended to be more successful as my thesis in any case have tended to be successful with helping ex-gang members come out of the gang and establish themselves afterwards is that they offer a space for building an identity, a capacity for someone who hasn't been able to go to college and probably won't be able to but can develop their skills as a leader, as a worship leader, as a youth leader, as a guy who goes out and tries to convince other people to leave the gang. As somebody he can develop an identity. Inclusion is a word but it's also the development of respect. People know who I am and respect me because I'm a part of something bigger than myself. If I may I'd like to add a couple of thoughts to what was just said. Inclusion is not about being counted. It's about being acknowledged. And for policy formulation the first step is to recognize that the legislation we have has failed or is no longer enough. But what makes it hard for politicians to actually move away from what they have been accustomed to is that in their minds that means that then they will be admitting to failure. I'm going to give you an example and I will not mention names. Not that I don't like to, it's just that I'm not, I shouldn't. But talking about inclusion and talking about drugs and talking about crime and talking about gangs. Tell me if you know of any government in this hemisphere that has taken the time to ask the youth how the drug problem is perceived, how it impacts their lives and what solutions would they like to see implemented. If you know of any government that has done that, please raise your hands. Well no you haven't. Now that is inclusion. If you hear the voices of the youth and you take into account and you're willing to accept that not being experts, they can actually give you ideas that could help us to formulate policy to prevent something and have them feel that their voices are heard and taken into account, that would give them a place in life. But we have a disengaged youth along the Americas. But I am happy to say that the OAS is now launching a collaborative program, a contest, which is called the Voice of the Youth of the Americas. And hopefully we will be able to engage the youth of the Americas in letting their governments know what they think about drugs, what the problem is, how it impacts them and hopefully they will provide solutions.   And I said, if you know it all, why would we fail so miserably? So, thanks. Yes, my name is Karine Weiss. I'm here today at my private capacity. And I have a question for the ambassador and it's about inclusion and exclusion. And I think back to the insurgencies and Columbia is still ongoing. But within the last few decades, one third of the insurgencies have had 30 to 40% women. And we don't talk about women, we just talk about men. And why do they join? One of the reasons that they joined is because they are excluded and they're excluded by discrimination in so many respects.  It's the guys who get the jobs, right?  It's the jobs program to me and I do respect. They're the ones getting the jobs. I don't see the women. I see them excluded. So, sir, where would this factor into your analysis or the women just going to not rise up? Thank you. Thank you. That is a great question. I am a man who has spent his salary in four women and my wife is okay with it. Three of them are my daughters. And I do believe that by far the greatest revolution my generation has seen is the rise of women. And I am hopeful that one day we will pass on to them the leadership role they deserve and this will be a better place. If you look at what is happening with the gangs, what is happening with drug trafficking, what is happening with incarceration, the rate at which women are being more and more a part of that is incredible. Over 50% of women in prisons today are in prison in drug-related activity. So, they have been very active and are more and more heads of gangs particularly in taking extortion money because they are better managers. So, once again, we would have to take a hard look at the existing legislation to see what needs to be done for women to play a larger role than their actual playing. And again, it all goes back to institutionalizing decision-making processes to reduce the undue influence of certain groups in that process. I don't understand why women are so quiet, but they are. And in hierarchical societies, women have yet to climb the first levels of that ladder. Not because they're not capable, it's because men are afraid of them.  So, there's a long way to go, but I think we're moving in the right direction. I don't think that my generation will see, will finish to see what's going to happen. But I do hope that it happens sooner than later. But you have to go back to legislation. I don't believe in quota approaches. I believe in legislation. If we're all equal in the eyes of the law, we should all be equal in the eyes of the law, but that's not the case with women. Can I just add really quickly also related to this is the issue of domestic violence also in Central America, which has also reached epidemic proportions. And again, another factor for why a lot of youth get involved with gangs being witnesses to violence in the home. And so it's something that we've been trying to address as well within the U.S. government. So we've been supporting the program now in Guatemala, a 24-hour court model that basically provides a one-stop shop for women who have been abused so they can show up and be offered counseling services, access to public defenders, have their case heard. And so it's something that was pushed very hard by the outgoing attorney general. So it's a great model for the region and one that we hope that we can continue to support. And also I just wanted to say I couldn't agree more with the ambassador on the issue of youth involvement engagement on these issues. Gives me an opportunity to do a quick infomercial for a program that we've been supporting in the region as well, which is a youth movement against violence. Which was started a few years ago and basically have a chapter in each country in the region. They've been offering policy recommendations to each of their national governments and they actually submitted a proposal on prevention to SICA at the presidential summit. So it's a great movement, a great group of young people and a great example of like what you can do with youth engagement and involvement on this issue. So we'd love to join forces with the effort that you guys are going to be doing at the OAS as well. So if we can inspire more of this kind of dialogue with youth activists in the region. So first of all, my name is Mark Hamilton. I'm a professor of multi-dimensional security at the American Defense College, which is linked with the OAS. And anyway, my thank you very much for the presentations. I'm familiar with work above your organizations and your research. Dr. Brunman and it's wonderful. My question deals at the level of the problematic civil military relations in the Americas. I think it's an understatement to say that there's a checkered past. Looking forward, I'd be interested in some of your perspectives surrounding the costs, the benefits and the challenges of how many of the countries in the region are employing the armed forces in public security capacities. We're talking Guatemala, we're talking Honduras, Salvador, we're talking Colombia. And I work with senior level military officers and it's fascinating. Many of them are in a situation in which they do not necessarily want to be involved in this. Their states are employing them because of like a police capacity. The militaries are there to kill people and break things. That's their job. Sending them in, what are the implications? What are the challenges, costs, benefits, all of this? I'd love to hear your perspectives. Thank you. Well, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think I saw it as I was leaving Guatemala. It is a huge challenge and it's a huge challenge on a lot of different levels. Why do governments pull the military in to do civilian law enforcement? Because generally the military has, they're better trained, they've traditionally been better trained. They have, in Spanish they say formación, they have a tradition of, you know, they take orders. You tell them to do something and generally they're going to do it. Who are the police officers in Central America or South America? Probably people who couldn't cut it in the military. You know, people with lesser education, people who come from different backgrounds, you know, diverse backgrounds. In our experience, when we do basic training, when the Department of Defense does basic training generally in Latin America, they're training people who know how to read and write. When we do basic training in Latin America, oftentimes the police, the new recruits, don't know how to read and write. They've never been to the Capitol before in a lot of instances. So it's a challenge. It raises, among other things, constitutional questions. Because the military is not, constitutionally is not supposed to be doing law enforcement.  So, you know, on the other hand, governments have to respond to citizens who want security. And a lot of people's minds, you know, we can't divorce a lot of why this happens from the citizens themselves. They don't care if it's a police officer or a military officer giving them security. They want security from gangs. So, in my opinion, the solution is, you know, better, we have to do more capacity building. We have to do more training on the people who are going to do civilian security and law enforcement, meaning the police, the prosecutors, the judges. And we're trying to address that. Okay. That's a very good question. I mean, you put it well. We just, Honduras basically just had a referendum in their last presidential election on this. And unfortunately, a lot of Hondurans really did want a joint patrols, joint usually meaning in Central America, majority soldiers and a couple of police officers thrown in to call it joint. And if they have formation, it's formation in war, you know, how to conduct war. That's not how you solve crimes. And that's not how you really, if you're going to do good policing, it's not just going out and finding the villain when right after he or she has committed the crime. It's going, interviewing citizens who've been victims and get taking information from them, finding out what to do and then processing that through a bureaucratic system in order to get justice. And the police are trained to do that, maybe not trained well, but they have some formation in that military officers are not trained in that. So what they do is they carry big weapons and people in the community breathe a sigh of relief, maybe some of them because some soldiers are coming in carrying big weapons. And in the case of Honduras and San Pedro Sula, I have friends who live there and they say, yeah, it's the same thing every time. You know, the police will come in with their trucks and a lot of people and they'll do like a style de sitio and the gang sort of melt into the background or start doing things in other neighborhoods. And as soon as the army moves out, then it's back to normal. It just doesn't work. And yet it's so politically, it's such a an attractive campaign slogan. We're going to put military out there and they're going to bust heads, but it's not about that. It's a lot more about court reform than reform and policing, I think, or not enough firepower. Yeah. I have to say that it's a question that in my former capacity, I had to think about. There's no easy answer, but once again, we need to go back to try to understand the root of the problem. In the case of Guatemala, when the peace courts were signed, the country found itself under tremendous international pressure to dismantle the security apparatus of the country. And it was done. Created a vacuum that were filled in immediately by organized. Okay. So now this is not who to blame. It is to try to understand what happened now. So you have rampant corruption. Okay. Lack of identity. Not a sense of country, not a sense of mission and very, very little training. And that defines the police throughout the region. Okay. You put them through a six month training program and then you put them out of the streets. I mean, the watermelon police academy is being on the putting it in place, putting it in place, putting it in place. And it never happens because there is not enough time to train them and to give them the character of an entity that needs to become an institution. Okay. So it continues to be an entity as opposed to the army that as I would agree with you, they're not trained to do policing work. They are not trained to investigate crime. But at least they are an institution. They follow orders. If you don't stand there rain or shine. They'll be there. You say the same. You give the same order to a police officer who's been trained for six months and he's hungry or needs to go to the bathroom. And he abandons his post. So how do, you know, how do we go about creating, regaining control of security issues and allowing time to train police? That's I think the biggest question. So it's not not to have them or not to have them is how long did you need them there and understanding that you have a vision that eventually they will have to move out of those roles. We just finished the first one year training program for police and it was a big day in the country.  There is no country in the world that can provide security for their citizens. Okay. We're at about 11%. Okay.  You talk about 50%. 65%. So then that tax base helps you provide schooling and the basic services for society. So you don't have to go out for the crimes because they have what they need. So again, is is the capturing of the national decision making processes. I mean, the government conducted at the beginning of this government a tax reform that transformed in less taxes. So, yes. I think we're going to have to end there and an interesting place to end because I think we could probably have a whole nother panel on that topic and that that issue of balancing civil civilian security provision with military security provision and where and when those roles are appropriate. Fascinating. But it is now my duty to hand over to Melanie Greenberg and thank her first of all for having us all and thank me to thank the panel. Thank you very much, Fiona. And thank you so much for this panel. It was absolutely fascinating. I pushed very hard to include this topic and to have all of you here because I feel that this issue of cross border and urban criminal violence is one of the most important frontiers for the peace building field. And we still don't have a good grasp yet of the tools that we need to help resolve this kind of conflict. I think that all of you very, very sensitively and creatively today gave us a roadmap and we'll forward to working more with you in the future and to talking more about these issues. So thank you. But I'd also like to take a moment to thank all of you for joining us today, that your energy and your passion for these issues was just palpable and tangible. And we're so delighted that you joined us today. I'd like to invite all of you to spend a little bit of time out in the foyer. There's still coffee, I believe. And at 630, if you'd like something a little harder, we'll all be gathering at the Beacon Hotel on Rhode Island Avenue between 16th and 17th streets. So please feel free to join us there. I'd like to thank USIP for hosting us today. It's been wonderful being here and working with everyone at the Institute. So thank you. And as a last word to encourage you, please fill out the surveys that we included in your package. Drop them off with any AFP or USIP staff member or on the registration table. It really helps us plan for next year. We'd love to hear your opinions. So again, thank you to the panel and thank you to all of you.