The Economist
HIALEAH, Nicaragua
From the age of 13 Victor Toruño walked the dirt streets of Hialeah, a
slum in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, with a shotgun in his hands. His gang,
Los Cancheros (a cancha is a sports pitch),
ruled the neighbourhood. “We felt that with guns we were like gods, we could do
anything we liked,” he says. Gang members were his only friends; a tattoo of a
skull on his left arm commemorates one whose head was cut off with a machete.
“I was machista. I was the one who told everyone what to do. I
was like a psychopath,” he says.
Mr Toruño, now 27, absorbed the codes of machismo from infancy. While he
hid under the bed, his father would beat up his mother. His father later
abandoned the family. Mr Toruño developed the same traits. He abused his
partner, Martha, yelled at his two children and felt hatred for those outside
his gang. Martha started to hate him, too. She considered stabbing him with a
kitchen knife after he punched her in the face. “I was living with an animal,”
she says. Eventually she left him.
In 2013 social workers from a Nicaraguan NGO, the Centre for the
Prevention of Violence (CEPREV), approached Mr Toruño in Hialeah. They showed
him crude cartoons that mirrored his own life of violence, alcoholism and
domestic abuse. “I saw myself in every image,” he says. It affected him so
deeply that he agreed to attend workshops to discuss the impulses that machismo
had encouraged in him.
Machismo is a tricky topic to discuss, not just with hard cases like Mr
Toruño. Sociologists say that though the origins of the word are Spanish, it is
a lazy stereotype applied to Latin American men. Macho cultures exist
everywhere, they note. Scholars seeking to explain the horrific murder rates in
Latin America (see chart) point to the region’s role as a conduit for drugs and
the gang culture that the trade brings with it. The few social programmes that
touch on machismo deal with the damage it does to women, rarely with its
effects on men.
Yet machismo helps entrench violence and worsens its effects. Souped-up
notions of masculinity are not uniquely Latin, but they are rife in the region,
especially among poorly educated youths. Women suffer greatly; men do at least
as much. The murder rate among men aged 15-29 in Mexico and Central America is
more than four times the global average for that age group, according to the
UN. More than 90% of victims in the region are men; globally the average is
79%. A 2011 study of murders in Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico’s border with the
United States, contends that the sadistic humiliation of victims that marks
these crimes arises from the region’s corrosive understanding of masculinity.
Global forces exacerbate the problem. Young men, competing for jobs in a
global market, have fewer opportunities; studious women have more. Denied the
role of breadwinner, some men seek to prove themselves through crime, violence
and domestic abuse. Often they have grown up without fathers because of
divorce, war or migration. The result, says Monica Zalaquett, the head of
CEPREV, is a “pressure-cooker effect” that cannot be contained in later life.
Tackling machismo directly can lessen the chance of explosion.
During 15 years CEPREV says it has broken up about 90 gangs in Nicaragua
by focusing on young men’s exaggerated sense of masculinity and the violence
that it leads to. In 2012-13 CEPREV spent six months working in a slum adjacent
to Hialeah where crime was rife. Social workers counselled gang members on
their lack of self-esteem, their concepts of machismo, their broken families
and their pent-up anger. They also sought to educate the police about the
dangers of machismo. Citing police statistics, CEPREV claims that crimes such
as mugging, theft and sexual harassment more than halved after its
intervention. In neighbouring Hialeah, where CEPREV had not yet entered, crime
rose 16% during the same period.
The agency cannot prove that its work caused the drop in crime; other
factors may have helped. But the results are so promising, says Andrew
Morrison, head of gender issues at the Inter-American Development Bank, that
the bank is funding evaluations of CEPREV’s programmes in neighbouring
Honduras, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world. If they prove
successful, they could be expanded into much bigger crime-prevention efforts
run by the government.
But funding for such programmes is scarce, not least because governments
worry that they are touching a cultural taboo. Focusing on protection of women
seems easier. Two years ago Sergio Muñoz was sponsored by the UN Development
Programme to hold a series of crime-prevention workshops for police in Costa
Rica, called “masculinity and violence”. He was baffled to discover that
funding for such projects has dried up. “You can’t hope to improve the fate of
women if you don’t work with the men, because these patterns of masculinity are
repeated from generation to generation,” he says.
In Mexico a programme run by the interior ministry employs social
workers to counsel children on the perils of machismo. Officials acknowledge
that it is a new field, and that they were laughed at when they first proposed
the idea of encouraging “new masculinities”. But it may be changing attitudes.
In a particularly violent part of Gómez Palacio, in the northern state of
Durango, children counselled on gender equality have painted street scenes
showing men carrying cudgels and verbally abusing women. One young boy, César
Vargas, came up to your correspondent and told him with no prompting that men
are “very rough” and should learn to respect women. Older children are enticed
into counselling with incentives like football coaching. Grown men are
generally considered lost causes.
Mr Toruño’s experience suggests that is wrong. He is now reunited with
Martha. At a gathering of family and friends their two children run excitably
between them. “I used to think women were useless. Now I think they are a
treasure,” he says. He helps at home with the children and the housework, and
shrugs it off when others laugh at him. Los Cancheros do not laugh; he has
persuaded his gang mates to renounce guns and enter counselling. Without it, he
says, “I’d be dead, in a wheelchair or in prison by now.” Half a dozen wiry
young men around him nod in agreement.
