As gangs continue to drive violence across Latin America and the Caribbean, new research is examining how social constructions of masculinity play into the problem.
Men carry out 90% of global firearms homicides, but the role of gender in that violence is often overlooked. In Latin America, the region with the highest homicide rates on the planet, gangs are dominated by men, who are overwhelmingly poor, marginalized, and have access to weapons. Women who live in the same circumstances often fall victim to violence, but are less likely to carry it out.
InSight Crime spoke to Adam Baird, a researcher with United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) Conventional Arms and Ammunition Programme, to understand why men comprise the overwhelming majority of gang members and how their gender vulnerabilities differ to women. We discuss Baird’s recent UNIDIR report that offers suggestions on practical ways to approach the role of masculinity and violence, and his book, “From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City,” which focuses on the role of masculinity in gang membership in Belize City’s Southside neighborhood.
InSight Crime (IC): Your recent UN report offers ways to move men away from gangs and armed violence. Can you explain why we need to focus on masculinity?
Adam Baird (AB): Male victimizing and victimization is genderless in terms of men. When we talk about homicide rates in any country, we don’t mention that it’s 90% men killing men. So why are we not speaking about this from a gender perspective? The feminist struggle has captured that idea of gender and how we need to work in that area. But men and masculinities are also gender, and we haven’t captured that effectively in terms of responding to violence.
While there’s a rich history of research linking men to armed violence, there are really no responses to that fact. We need to research and think about best practices toward addressing the issue. Between 2012 and 2014, we ran Southside Youth Success, a unique masculinity-focused gang intervention program. Of 120 participants, we managed to get 90 into paid apprenticeships, back into work, or back into school.
We learned that if we can provide vulnerable young men with decent opportunities that, importantly, give them a sense of dignity and esteem, they’ll take them. But dignity and esteem are gendered in these settings. We needed to cover basic needs and provide tangible economic outcomes for those young men to engage. People have to be hyper pragmatic when they don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
And we used men’s talk programs to redirect agency and intelligence, away from engaging in gang activity of brutalizing women, of killing other angry young men. We also dealt with male trauma. A lot of the men in that program were victims of sexual abuse, as are many gang members. There is a lot of trauma to unpack and often addiction issues.
But the fundamental aspect of giving men a way out of violence is providing those tangible economic opportunities. This was clear during my disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration research in Medellín. One young mid-ranking gang member told me he would quit the gang if he was given a job as a bank manager, a position parallel to the masculine status his gang position gave him in his neighborhood. He wouldn’t leave the gang to work as a street sweeper, which is what he was being offered.
We’re never going to stop armed violence unless we talk about male armed violence. This is about men and violence, and we’re not doing the men part.
IC: Can you explain your idea of “vulnerable masculinities” and how it relates to gang dynamics in Belize City?
AB: Let’s first define how chronic vulnerability and chronic violence relate to vulnerable masculinity. We can think of chronic vulnerability in Belize City’s Southside as this milieu of systematic, historical, and structural exclusion. The chronic vulnerability there goes all the way back to slavery, it’s transhistorical. The concept is three-dimensional: temporal in that it has continued through time across generations; intense in that the level of poverty is extreme, children there are starving; and located, in that these conditions have always persisted on Southside.
Chronic violence is the same. It is also a three-dimensional concept in that it must be sustained, intense, and located. Again, Southside fits this.
I noticed that in Belize, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica, where I’ve worked, these two concepts only appear in areas of intense poverty. Wherever there is intense poverty, the likelihood of violence is greater.
Within this context of disenfranchisement, boys grow up to be men. They seek self-esteem through certain performative means — they want clothes, they want to go out. To be seen with less attracts shame. The gang, despite the dangers, is an opportunity for these men to achieve that status. They don’t join to kill people, but violence offers a ticket out of the socioeconomic circumstances — where esteem is hard to find — that they live in.
The political economy of the gang depends on the use of force, or the ability to carry out violence. Because of this, it is seen as men’s work. And it is an opportunity for men in a way that it is not for women, even though women live in the same circumstances of chronic vulnerability and violence. Traumatized young men who go into that space then become violent.
IC: How did US-style gangs arrive in Belize, and how did the social terrain of Belize City’s Southside neighborhood offer them fertile ground to grow?
AB: There are several dynamics in Belize to note when thinking about the growth of gangs.
The first is gang transnationalism, which is usually talked about in Northern Triangle countries [and the growth of the Maras there following their deportation from the United States] in the 1990s. Gang transnationalism to Belize occurred before this — one of the first gang members I spoke to in Belize City had been deported in 1981.
According to some estimates, 40% of Belizeans immigrated to the United States for economic reasons following Hurricane Hattie in 1961, which destroyed Belize City. Belizeans are mainly Creole, which for them means a mixture of the former slave population and, to a certain extent, the White British former slave owners. So, when most of them went to the United States, arriving in poorer parts of cities in California, some joined African American gangs like the Bloods and the Crips, slotting in relatively seamlessly because of the language and racial similarities. Young Belizean men learned the gang rule book on US streets.
Some were later deported to Belize, arriving in historically impoverished parts of Belize City, like the Northside and Southside. The Southside neighborhood was originally founded as a slave barracks and has always been marginalized. It’s a place where chronic vulnerability exists.
Those deportees were angry and were looking for an identity and self-esteem in their new home. They slowly formed that identity, taking over the Base Boys — the name given to local men who sold marijuana on street corners but didn’t really engage in serious violence. Blood and Crips cliques were set up – George Street was the Bloods, on the Southside, and Majestic Alley was Crips on Northside.
In the 1990s, those gangs were relatively stable with leaders called generals, a term taken from Jamaica gangs led by names like Dudus Coke. This gave them a top-down structure, orders were clear. There were not too many weapons.
Then, in the late 90s and the early 2000s, there were serious police interventions. Gang leaders were arrested, others were killed. This began the fragmentation of gangs, and violence rose, sparking a massive demand for firearms which was men by arms from Guatemala. Once the guns flooded in, they didn’t disappear, and the genie couldn’t be put back in the bottle. Belize City is a small place, so fighting was very condensed. A homicide boom took place, peaking in 2017 at 99 per 100,000 in Belize City [45 per 100,000 for the country as a whole].
* This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Feature image: Gang members walk through Belize City after being released from prison in 2020 as part of a peace agreement with the government. Credit: San Pedro Sun.