by Franklin Moreno
In approximately two months there will be general elections in Honduras—a country where much of the population live in difficult living conditions. I’ve spoken to youth and adults in the city of San Pedro Sula about the elections and have been told the same thing numerous times: the elections are rigged and nothing will change. The running joke seems to be, “even dead people vote here.” More important is what people think about their living conditions. In a survey conducted by the Instituto Universitario en Democracia, Paz y Seguridad (IUDPAS) of the Universidad Autonóma de Honduras (UNAH) in 2016, 61% of the participants identified insecurity to be the primary concern they face in the country. Although the percentage had dropped 9% from a 2014 survey, this fear of insecurity remains evident in various ways, impacting many facets of life for the younger and older generations.
These past few years, I’ve conversed with children, adolescents and adults about violence in a city whose general public image is synonymous with homicide rates and gang conflict. My research focuses on children’s and adolescents’ moral evaluations and understanding about gang-related violence. What I’ve learned thus far is that the dimensions of violence extend beyond any particular gang border, extortion or neighborhood. The youth I’ve spoken to carry a burden of being branded as violent delinquent offenders by an anxious society. They are conscious that their existential being has been stigmatized as the source of society’s ills and potential hostility. And that comes with a high price. Time and time again I have listened to adolescents and young adults express their frustration about the discrimination they face at job interviews because of where they live. At a recent Día de los Niños celebration in the sector of Chamelecón in San Pedro Sula, a young man said he struggled with making a decision about whether to migrate north or stay in his neighborhood. His dream is to establish an organization to work with kids who live on the streets but he doesn’t know how to even begin. The staff at Fundación Nacional para el Desarrollo de Honduras (FUNADEH), the foundation I am collaborating with, has confirmed this widespread practice of employer discrimination and has been working to change such beliefs, fears, and practices. According to certain foundation staff, there has been slight progress, but it is far from any adequate change for social amelioration.
All this is to say that the sense of political apathy, outrage, or defeat regarding the upcoming elections reflects the daily burdens and constraints people live in. As one social psychologist expressed it to me the other day, I have come to study violence in the place where all the ingredients are combined into a perfect soup. There are overt forms of violence rendered invisible while other criminal forms involving adolescents and young adults are consistently etched into the public’s mind. There is much attention focusing on changing the attitudes and behavior of youth through prevention and de-escalation programs, but the inverse is less discussed: how to modify the attitudes and behaviors of a discriminating and marginalizing broader society. While FUNADEH and other organizations have been conducting workshops to teach children and adolescents certain social-moral values on conflict resolution, virtues and forgiveness, there are fewer public examinations on the values promoted, contradicted, and embodied by social institutions that wield great power.
For instance, which values or constitutional rights did congress protect from or subordinate to state violence when recently modifying the Honduran Penal Code with article 590, giving the judicial branch the ability to classify public protests as ‘acts of terror’ against the State? No clear measures of interpretation are provided in the bill nor were they stated in a September 19th congressional debate about how the constitutional right to public protests would be safeguarded from being classified as acts terror. Instead only vague phrases or references to acts of grave violence such as the 9/11 attacks in New York City were used to evoke the notion of terrorism. This legal, strategic maneuver anticipates the potential public unrest directed at the current President’s pursuit of a second-term given the contested nature of the Constitution that makes illegal any president from being reelected. The danger of such a general anti-terror law is compounded by the fact that people have expressed a low level of confidence in institutions of justice. In the same IUDPAS 2016 survey, 44% of respondents didn’t have confidence in the Military Police, 59% in the National Police, 56% Supreme Court/Judges, and 69% in Congress. The percentages in public belief about police and military corruption in the survey were even greater.
The veil is temporarily lifted with every conversation I have with staff members of organizations and foundations, youth, and acquaintances. These invisible forms of violence begin to reveal themselves. But these visible and recondite forms of violence are not inherent to Honduras ‘culture’. Valuing and obscuring such violence is reflected in foreign and domestic policies of other countries to the point that conceptions of ‘Western/non-Western’ or ‘modern/traditional’ dichotomies evoked in certain social science research circles are rendered into platitudes. For instance, we can see plenty of examples of this segmentation in public and research discussions on violence in society that focus on particular forms of criminal violence or violent video games in the United States. Yet such discussions exclude the fact that celebrating military power and dominance is demanded of the public as much in politics as it is in Hollywood films. We lose sight of the accepted institutional forms of violence when there is fierce debate in congress and in major news media channels about funding the U.S. health care or education system while remaining almost silent on military spending or gagged on the topic of gun regulations. Consider that the 2016 proposal for providing free public college education at a cost of $47 billion per year was publicly castigated in the U.S. by both major political parties and the media as an absurd idea likely to bankrupt the country, or that Congress allowed the $14 billion Children’s Health Insurance Program to expire. Meanwhile there was near political unanimity for increasing the U.S. military budget by $80 billion without any public or political scrutiny of its costs or merit. The annual public military budget is now close to $700 billion.
In both Honduras and the United States, examination of factors related to health, employment or educational opportunities is critical in understanding why certain individuals feel whether or not they have a choice to participate in dangerous and violent activities. In deepening our understanding of the root causes of unrest and violence however, other factors such as discrimination, impunity, corruption, structural poverty, or celebrating legal forms of mass violence must also be examined. And one way to gain a better understanding is to ask those who are typically spoken to or spoken for (i.e., children and adolescents) on what they think about these contradictory societal practices and values impacting their lives.
Franklin Moreno is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Development and Education at U.C. Berkeley. His current research in Honduras and Nicaragua focuses on children and adolescent moral evaluations and psychological explanations about violence in the contexts of gang conflict.
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