Getting the roots of gang violence in Colombia

Violence is dominated in some areas of the world, yet people lead relatively peaceful lives. Political scientists Enzo Nusio are conducting research as to why this is the case and is looking for strategies to make countries more peaceful in Latin America.

“Plata O Plomo” -Silver or Lead. This is the same that says in a scene of the former Colombian drug Lord Pablo Escobar Netflix series Narcos. If you do not cooperate (and take bribe) then what does it mean, you will be shot. And so, during the series runtime, we see that many opponents of Escobar have been killed. But this was not just on screen: It is said that the real Escobar was much more violent than the figures depicted in the Netflix film in the 1970s and 1980s.

Latin America cities are still some of the most violent places in the world-Escobar died long ago and the era of all-powerful drug Lords ended. Surprisingly, very few people know about why this is the case. There are now some indications that drug trafficking is not the main cause of excessive violence.

“Drug trafficking has increased in Colombia in recent years, but there has been a decline in the level of violence,” Anzo Nusio says, who have been researching that the cycle of violence in Latin America has been triggered for many years Is. What is more, Colombia was a violent country before the smuggling of drugs started almost four decades ago. “And examples of Bolivia and Peru suggest that you cannot do any violence on a large scale.”

Why are some areas of the world in violence, yet people lead relatively peaceful lives? Nusio has intended to spend the next five years while working with three to four employees to find answers to this question.

Many documentaries and chains on TV and streaming platforms, at least clearly, that evil people are the root cause of violence. For example, they show Pablo Escobar showing their opponents threatening with anger -filled face or approved the killing of former close colleagues in cold blood. Nevertheless, Nussio is certain that there are structural reasons behind violence.

For his research, the 44 -year -old traveled to Colombia to interview dozens of people who fought in the country’s civil war. “If they are ready to lay their weapons, thousands of others are ready to take their place.”

The same thing applies to drug Lords: If Escobar had not seized power, someone else would have done so. In other words, these are not individual people, but specific conditions that cause violence. But what are these circumstances?

Outside his office, Nusio has hung the A3-shaped poster. “Reduction in urban violence: Bogota as a case of success and future testing” says. And the question is why the level of violence in some cities in Latin America including Bogota is decreasing? The capital of Columbia is now watching six times less murders in the early 1990s.

Nusio has sung the major question that has always fascinated him: “Is such a trend just spontaneously, or can you affect it?”

He thinks that previous efforts by academics to answer this question have been unsatisfactory. There is a complete host of potential explanations, suggesting that the violence is minimized with some macro trends. This is the argument made by historians, for example, when they explain why we do not cut each other’s head in Switzerland, such as people used in the Middle Ages – nation building, modernization, democratization or Low inequality is mentioned.

“But most of the conclusions of such research are disappointing,” says Nusio. “Finally, they suggest that we cannot make a great deal, and it may take hundreds of years before the violence is reduced.”

And Nusio is also doubting whether they are accurate. As it happens, the Latin American countries develop more democratic and more economically than many others around the world.

Organized onion farmer

Research in criminals investigates the issue of violence at a very different level. For example, it asks what the police need to do to quit urban violence. Nusio has investigated it and found some success: a campaign by the police that they managed to reduce violence in Bogota. The police had put up posters on the 150 most dangerous roads in the city, listing how many criminals from each place were already arrested.

The fact that the campaign has worked, is seen as a success by local authorities, as it shows that there are easy and cheap ways for the police to reduce violence than patrolling on every road corner. .

Nevertheless, Nusio explains how he used to feel disappointed later as he also saw how the violence came back after coming down the poster. He realized that you need more than only posters to deal with the symptoms, but also to get into the heart of a huge problem of violence. Enzo Nussio is now pursuing a new strategy. He wants to take a look at the way of living together in local communities.

“The relationship between local and government organizations is an important factor,” they believe. He explains what he meant to cite the example of Jantus de ACon Komunal (JAC), of which there are thousands of Colombia. These are organized groups of citizens at a community level, which have a lot of impact in some areas in Colombia.

Some of them were formed for economic reasons. For example, in a village that he had to travel, he met the local people who formed a team to form a union of onion farmers. The head of the head of this association may have more power than the local mayor because almost all the people living in the village are poor and depended on the business of onion.

Local organizations like these will cooperate more or less with government officials. In some areas, there is real enmity between civil and government organizations. “People of these places want less government, not too much,” says Nussio.

But there are also local communities in which the local JAC president works with the mayor, to discuss what should be done to fix the pits in the road. Nusio believes that this work cooperation between citizens and government organizations can be an important factor in reducing violence in the long term.

Complane through newspaper articles

First and foremost, the researcher requires information about violence in Colombia to test this hypothesis. And he needs a lot because, after all, he wants to document EBBS and flow in the level of violence in the last hundred years in the level of violence, first in the level of violence. He can get some figures from the authorities, but he also wants to use machine learning to comb through digitized newspaper articles. He also intends to include oral history from interviews with contemporary witnesses.

Once information is obtained, it will be possible to compare. It would be especially interesting to examine areas in which the level of violence in a specific period has decreased. This is the place where Nusio can detect further questions: What were the reasons for the decline? Was political decisions made, or some structures were imposed?

Ideally, it would be possible to identify strategies that successfully reduced the level of violence in the past. Nusio says that an area experiment will then be conducted to test whether this strategy still works today.

But still, will local politicians and citizens follow the recommendations from their research? Nusio shrugs. “To protect people from violence,” he says, “is one of the most important functions of countries. If they fail to do so, it leads to great disappointment.” Nusio will now determine to analyze the spiral of violence by 2030. “But,” he says, “This is really my life project.”