Following in the footsteps of last year’s international conference on violence and policing in Latin American and U.S. Cities, on April 28th and 29th of 2015, the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) turned Encina Hall at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI) into a dynamic, instructive and stimulating discussion platform. The exchange of experiences, expertise and ideals that flourished within this space helped create a “dialogue for action,” as speakers and participants explored the various dimensions of youth and criminal violence in Mexico, Brazil and the United States, while advocating for the importance of opening up adequate pathways to hope. The event was sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, The Bill Lane Center for the America West, The Mexico Initiative at FSI, and the Center on International Security and Cooperation.
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In April, the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law welcomed academics, policymakers, practitioners and youth leaders from Latin America, the U.K. and the U.S. to explore educational and entrepreneurial initiatives to support youth in places of violence.
Building on last year’s theme on violence and policing, the conference examined the rise in criminality among youth in both Latin America and the U.S., calling on attendees to share best practices aimed at curbing this trend. The conference served as a platform for attendees to highlight innovative government and community-based programs that have been successful in steering youth away from violence and towards more promising pathways.
"This conference is the result of a long reflection on the connection of poverty, violence, inequality and corruption," said Associate Professor of Political Science and PovGov Director Beatriz Magaloni who organized the conference. "However, our goal is not to reflect on the costs of violence, but to highlight alternatives that organizations, public officials and individuals are helping create. We want to reflect on the work that has been happening on the ground and on the revolution that these players are making."
The two-day conference featured two keynote addresses. The first was delivered by Brazil’s Sub-Secretary of Youth and President of the National Council on Youth (CONJUVE) Angela Guimarães who remarked on violence and its negative impact on educational and employment opportunities for Brazilian youth.
“The current youth experience is marked by violence,” Guimarães said. “There has been an expansion in access to education, work, formalization and quality of life, but violence continues to mark this generation.”
The other keynote speaker Héctor Castillo Berthier highlighted his 28 year-old NGO, Circo Volador, one of the longest-running social interventions in Mexico. The organization supports excluded sectors of society, promoting culturally appropriate arts and culture programming to youth in collaboration with community partners.
Keynote: Angela Guimarães, Sub-Secretary of Youth (Brazil)
“We created a new common language that we could all understand,” said Castillo Berthier. “We planned things with them. We drew with them. We produced things on the ground with them. We gave them respect, self-sustainability and the space. This example must be taken into account when forming public policies."
Both days of the conference featured research presentations, uncovering some of the innovative evaluation work underway by the PovGov team. PovGov Postdoctoral Fellow Brenda Jarillo Rabling spoke about the effect of drug-related violence on educational outcomes for children in areas of high crime, such as Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Rabling’s study pointed to the strong connection between violence and loss of instructional time in schools where the quality and quantity of school days are lower than the national average, creating inequality within the education system.
Gustavo Robles Peiro, a PhD student at Stanford’s political science department and PovGov pre-doctoral fellow, shared the results of a comprehensive impact study, which evaluated the overall effectiveness of Jóvenes con Porvenir, a government program operating in Zapopan, Mexico, that offers work and educational opportunities for youth living in neighborhoods with high levels of crime. Robles Peiro’s research found that over a six-month period, youth exposed to the program exhibited greater interest in pursuing educational and career endeavors.
Keynote: Hector Castillo Berthier, Circo Volador
Academic research was complemented by the individual experiences of youth and youth advocates. Among them was Christa Gannon, founder and executive director of Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), a Bay Area-based organization, which works with local at-risk and incarcerated youth to build their skills and reduce delinquent behavior through leadership training, legal education and active mentorship.
“Our youth have incredible strengths, but often society does not see them,” said Gannon. “At FLY, we always ask ourselves how do we look for strengths and potential in everyone that we work with - how do we see our young people as resources and co-creators that have so much to offer us?”
Gannon’s remarks were echoed by a number of other speakers, highlighting the need to provide more platforms for youth to become active community citizens, whether through education, volunteering, leadership, or artistic and cultural production.
Former inmate Felix Lucero spoke about his 18-year incarceration experience as a student of the Prison University Project, an initiative that provides higher education to inmates of San Quentin State Prison in California. “[The program] affects people not only when they get out of prison, but also while they are in there… it gives us something to look up to,” Lucero said. “Education allows people to think critically about their surroundings and empower people to do things differently.”
Marcus Faustini, founder of Agência de Redes Para Juventude (Network for Youth Agency) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, expanded on the topic of youth opportunity, touching on his organization’s mission. “We knock from door to door in the favela. We don’t want to educate the youth, we want to walk alongside them. Social projects don’t have to give people fish, they need to teach people how to fish. At Agência, we go to the supermarket, buy the fish and cook it with the youth. We do things with them,” said Faustini.
Another theme emphasized by many of the conference speakers was the influence of arts and culture as an outlet for self-expression for many youth growing up in violent societies. To help illustrate the hopefulness of many of these youth projects, the PovGov Program hosted a photography exhibit inside the conference hall that contained a collection of twelve iconic photographs highlighting life in the slum neighborhoods – favelas – of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The collection was presented by Imagens do Povo, an arts initiative under Observatorio de Favelas (Favela’s Observatory), an NGO, which educates youth on critical urban issues affecting the under-resourced favela communities of Rio.
The conference concluded with a dynamic panel of youth activists and leaders who shared their inspirational accounts of experiencing and overcoming the challenge of criminality and violence in their hometowns. Drawing unconnected, but similar life stories of struggles and hardships, the panel provided examples of how individuals leveraged a variety of tools, resources, and community-based organizations to transform themselves – and others – to help bring about positive social change to their communities.
Mariluce de Souza, a social entrepreneur and artist from the Alemão favela in Rio, emphasized the significance of youth-to-youth assistance: “It is like a language from the community to the community,” she said. “We come together to demand respect and rights.”
PovGov signs a Crime Lab partnership agreement with Marcus Faustini (Agência de Redes para Juventude)(right) and Jailson Silva (Observatório de Favelas)(second from left).
Seeking to broaden its network and impact globally, PovGov also used the conference to serve as a launching point for its new International Crime and Violence Lab – Crime Lab – a new platform for academics and practitioners to share their work and research on crime and violence throughout the U.S., Latin America, and beyond. The Lab seeks to develop scientific and action-oriented research by assisting community organizations, government agencies, policy-makers, police departments, and other relevant players in Latin America - and eventually elsewhere in the developing world - to reduce violent crime and its devastating consequences.
Two of Crime Lab’s newest partners – Jailson de Sousa e Silva, co-founder and director of Observatorio de Favelas, and Marcus Faustini of Agência – signed a partnership agreement during the conference, opening the door to future research collaborations with PovGov focused on improving the youth experience in Rio.
All speaker presentations were video recorded and can be found on the CDDRL YouTube page and below. To view other conference materials, including an executive summary and full conference report; agenda; speaker bios; and presentation slides, please see below or refer to the original conference event page.
In 2006 the Mexican government launched an aggressive campaign to weaken drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs). The security policies differed significantly from those of previous administrations in the use of a leadership strategy (the targeting for arrest of the highest levels or core leadership of criminal networks). While these strategies can play an important role in disrupting the targeted criminal organization, they can also have unintended consequences, increasing inter-cartel and intra-cartel fighting and fragmenting criminal organizations. What impact do captures of senior drug cartel members have on the dynamics of drug-related violence? Does it matter if governments target drug kingpins vs. lower ranked lieutenants? We analyze whether the captures or killings of kingpins and lieutenants have increased drug-related violence and whether the violence spills over spatially. To estimate effects that are credibly causal, we use different empirical strategies that combine difference-in-differences and synthetic control group methods. We find evidence that captures or killings of drug cartel leaders have exacerbating effects not only on DTO-related violence, but also on homicides that affect the general population. Captures or killings of lieutenants, for their part, only seem to exacerbate violence in “strategic places” or municipalities located in the transportation network. While most of the effects on DTO-related violence are found in the first six months after a leader’s removal, effects on homicides affecting the rest of the population are more enduring, suggesting different mechanisms through which leadership neturalizations breed violence.
Participant youth, Wallace and Wellington, overlooking the city from their community.
CONFERENCE OVERVIEW
The heavy presence of youth and young adults in the world of criminality is an issue that has been gaining increasingly more attention in the agendas of policymakers and politicians in developing and developed nations. With scarce options for a quality education, prospects for gainful employment and the possibility for future economic sustainability, on a daily basis, young individuals from poor communities throughout Latin American and U.S. cities are exposed to a violent environment with easily accessed - and often attractive - gateways into the world of criminality. From casual affiliation to gangs in schools and neighborhoods in Southern California, to full-time armed participation in international drug cartels in Juarez and drug factions in Rio de Janeiro favelas, youth are the biggest target – and victims – of violence.
In attempts to shed light to this very complex and fundamental issue that is claiming thousand of lives every year and deteriorating the social fabric across cities, the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in conjunction with the Center for Latin American Studies, The Bill Lane Center for the America West, The Mexico Initiative at FSI, and The Center on International Security and Cooperation, will hold a two-day conference to discuss the dimensions of youth and criminal violence in Latin American and U.S. cities and share pathways to hope.
Ranging from grassroots initiatives to widespread government policies, the conference will develop on various established development actions and programs aimed at providing educational, work, and entrepreneurial opportunities for youth in territories impacted by poverty, criminality and violence in the U.S. and Latin America. We will gather activists and practitioners from grassroots civil society organizations, community leaders, educators, professionals from international development platforms, policy-makers, politicians, scholars - as well as some of the very individuals participating in these programs - to discuss the many challenges faced by the youth population in these different locations and to share innovative and inspirational initiatives to generate opportunities and foster change.
At PovGov, we believe in the importance of creating an environment where actors with different backgrounds across sectors, disciplines, realities and environments can come together to share their first-hand experiences, challenges and aspirations. We hope this wide-reaching and multiplayer conference can enrich the discussion around the formulation of policies and development strategies to benefit the youth in places of violence and better inform the work moving forward.
· Brenda Jarillo, Post-Doctoral Fellow, PovGov, Stanford University.
· Monica Valdez González, Director of Research and Studies, IMJUVE, Mexico.
Discussant: Francis Fukuyama, Director, Program on Governance, Stanford University.
10:40 – 11:40
Keynote Speaker
The Agenda for Youth Violence Prevention in Brazil: Where We Are Now and Where We Are Heading
Angela Guimarães, Brazil’s Sub-Secretary of Youth and President of the National Council on Youth (CONJUVE)
11:50 – 12:50: Lunch
1:00 – 2:30
Panel 2. Initiatives for At-risk Youth in Rio Favelas
· Eliana de Sousa e Silva, Director, Redes de Desenvolvimento da Maré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
· Jailson de Sousa e Silva, Director, Observatório de Favelas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
· Ivana Bentes, National Secretary of Citizenship and Cultural Diversity, Brazil.
Discussant: Larry Diamond, Director, CDDRL, Stanford University.
(10-minute break)
2:40 – 4:10
Panel 3. Reducing Youth Gang Activity and Violence in the U.S.
· Amy Crawford, Deputy Director, Center for Crime Prevention and Control, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
· Lateefah Simon, Director, California’s Future Initiative at Rosenberg Foundation, San Francisco, California.
· Christa Gannon, Founder and Director, Fresh Lifelines for Youth, San Mateo and Santa Clara, California.
Discussant:Bruce Cain, Director, Bill Lane Institute for the American West, Stanford University.
4:15 – 5:00: Closing Event of the Day
Stanford International Crime and Violence Lab announcement; cooperation agreement ceremony; photography exposition from Observatório de Favelas (“People’s Images” project).
· Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University.
· Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Stanford University.
(Adjourn)
Wednesday, April 29th 2015
9:00- 10:30
Panel 4. Evaluating Effective Interventions for Youth
· Jorja Leap, Adjunct Professor, Department of Social Welfare; Director, Health and Social Justice Partnership, UCLA.
Julie Cordua, executive director of Thorn, a non-profit organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, spoke passionately on the topic child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery for the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series U.S Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights on February 4, 2015.
Cordua addressed the Stanford audience about the importance of technology for acting as the “digital defenders of children." She provided a chilling account of child sexual exploitation, first describing the problem and then going on to challenge preconceived notions about it. For example, she highlighted that in order to tackle the issue, it must first be understood that it concerns a highly vulnerable population; most child victims of sexual exploitation come from extremely abusive backgrounds and many have been sexually abused by one or more parents.
Cordua emphasized that technology innovations have contributed to a proliferation of child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery through the use of encrypted networks that make it extremely difficult to hunt down perpetrators and find victims. Cordua feels that while technology is intensifying the problem, technology is also the solution. Examples she gave were the development of algorithms that aim to track perpetrators and their victims and advertisements that encourage pedophiles to seek help.
Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, queried Cordua on Thorn’s relationship with the government and private sector, as well as on Thorn’s approach for testing the efficacy of their programs. Cordua responded that Thorn does not apply for government funds so as to maintain independence over their projects but that they actively cultivate strong relationships with politicians and law enforcers. In relation to evaluation metrics, Cordua acknowledged that metrics are especially difficult in such a cryptic field as it is nearly impossible to know what numbers they are dealing with from the onset. Questions from the audience included effective strategies for changing the conversation of pedophilia in the public sphere, the emotional stamina required for pursuing such work, and strategies for connecting with and providing a safe platform for victims of child sexual exploitation.
Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights
This paper provides an account of the strategies of extortion and co-optation used by drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) toward civil society in Mexico. Drawing on the civil war and mafia crime literatures, our theoretical approach focuses on levels of territorial contestation among armed actors, as well as state capture by DTOs, to explain variation in co-opting or coercing civil society. Through the use of list experiments in a nationally representative survey, the paper measures extortion and assistance by DTOs in Mexico. We find that the effect of territorial contestation among rival DTOs has two effects. The effect on extortion is non-linear: highly contested places and non-contested places, controlled by a single DTO, show significantly less extortion than moderately contested places. The effect on assistance is negative: DTOs provide assistance mostly in non-contested places. Additionally, using areas of governance by the former ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), as a proxy for state capture by DTOs, we find that both DTO and police extortion is higher in municipalities where the state has been captured. These results suggest that territorial contestation and state capture are important in determining the choice of tactics toward civil society during drug wars.
When Mexican President Felipe Caldrón took office in December 2006 he declared a war on the nation’s drug traffic organizations (Ríos and Shirk, 2011). Violence escalated as criminal organizations became increasingly fragmented and disputed their territories (Killebrew and Bernal, 2010; Beittel, 2011). The main strategy followed by the federal government involved capturing leaders and lieutenants of criminal organizations (Calderón et al. forthcoming). This seemed to provoke even more violence, by making the competition over territorial control fiercer and providing incentives for many gangs to make extortion and protection fees (derecho de piso) an additional source of revenue (Guerrero-Gutiérrez, 2010). Given the absence of legal (and peaceful) rules and enforcement mechanisms for competitors in the illegal drug market, disagreements were usually solved violently. Under the pressure of the crackdown by the federal police, the navy and the army, contracts among criminal gangs were often disrupted, leading to even more violence.1 Competition over the strategic routes towards the market in the United States was settled by literally eliminating rivals (Dell, 2012).
This chapter explores the connection between police distrust, corruption and extortion. Despite the difficulty in measuring these phenomena through conventional public opinion polls and citizen or firm level surveys, much can be learned from the variation across geographic units in reported victimization and corruption. We use a list experiment collected through the Survey on Public Safety and Governance in Mexico (SPSGM), to study the practices of extortion by both police forces and criminal organizations.4 Using a Bayesian spatial estimation method, we provide a mapping of the geographic distribution of police extortion.
The global cities of Latin America - Rio de Janeiro, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Mexico City and Medellin - have become engines of economic growth. These cities attract remarkable talent across all levels and build extensive networks that allow for innovation and the circulation of ideas. But crime, violence and the dissolution of the social fabric threaten the main attraction of these cities and significantly undermine development prospects. The challenge of providing policing that protects citizens, especially those living in the poorest neighborhoods where gangs and other criminal organizations tend to concentrate, is daunting. The conference on violence and policing in Latin America and US cities brought together academics, policy makers, NGOs, and citizens to reflect on how cities in Latin America are meeting the challenges of rising
criminal violence. Particular focus was given to the “policing” processes in cities that have experienced and successfully reduced civil war-like levels of violence. The goal was to reflect on the dynamics and varieties of security strategies, police reform and efforts to rebuild the social fabric of major cities. The conference was hosted by the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Other centers and institutions at Stanford University that co-sponsored the conference include the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Mexico Initiative’ at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Thorn (www.wearethorn.org) drives technology innovation to fight child sexual exploitation. The talk will provide an overview of how technology has drastically changed the dynamics of crimes against children and will present concepts for how technology can also be used in new, innovative ways to combat these crimes and protect children.
Bechtel Conference Room, Encina Hall
Julie Cordua
Speaker
CEO,Thorn
Helen Stacy
Director
Commentator
Program on Human Rights
Keynote: Angela Guimarães, Sub-Secretary of Youth (Brazil)
Keynote: Hector Castillo Berthier, Circo Volador
PovGov signs a Crime Lab partnership agreement with Marcus Faustini (Agência de Redes para Juventude)(right) and Jailson Silva (Observatório de Favelas)(second from left).
Participant youth, Wallace and Wellington, overlooking the city from their community.
