It isn’t often that strikingly different approaches to the same problem unfold in politics side by side, enabling societies to measure their relative merits. Yet as gang and drug cartel violence spreads into new areas of Latin America, countries across the region have become laboratories for two strategies that could not be less alike.
In El Salvador, the government has arrested more than 65,000 males accused of gang activity over the past year, some not yet teenagers. The homicide rate has plummeted, and public approval for President Nayib Bukele has soared. Leaders in neighboring countries like Honduras and Guatemala have taken note.
In Colombia, meanwhile, the government has pledged to bring “total peace” to a country that has been destabilized for decades by criminal violence and guerrilla warfare. Skeptics have scoffed at that ambition. But the careful preservation of a delicate truce between rival street gangs this week has reinforced a useful lesson that innocence and the desire for peace are innate and renewable.
Shortly after his inauguration last August, Colombian President Gustavo Petro invited gang leaders in the port city of Buenaventura, a longtime crossroads of criminal violence, to sit together in talks. A shared recognition emerged almost immediately. As one gang delegate told Al Jazeera, the two sides agreed that “it’s unfair that Buenaventura, having a people that is so peaceful, has so much violence and that it’s us that are killing each other. So [we] decided that this had to end.”
Months then passed without a homicide in the city. But earlier this month, the disappearance of one gang’s spokesperson threatened to push the two sides back toward conflict. A broad grouping of civil society organizations banded together to support a resolution. On Tuesday, the government announced that the truce had been restored. The agreement included a recognition that peace requires “confronting with institutional programs the roots of the deep inequality” in Colombian society. “
Total peace,” Mr. Petro has argued, rests as much on tackling corruption and uneven economic opportunity, particularly for women and minorities, as it does on turning violent actors into peace partners.
In El Salvador, human rights groups note, Mr. Bukele’s approach to gang violence required first weakening the independence of democratic institutions like parliament and the judiciary. In Colombia, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace has instructed all government agencies, including the military, to seek to build peace that “protects the life and liberties of the citizens.”
If “we sow love, [if] we dialogue from our differences and finally we manage to understand each other,” Mr. Petro said in his Christmas message to the nation last December, “we will reap in the work that each one of us does for our country.”
Across Latin America, an experiment in peacemaking is unfolding in dragnets and dialogue. One has set democratic values aside in the pursuit of security. The other recognizes that the common good rests on the ability of even those who perpetuate violence to express self-governance.