Tegucigalpa – Central American editors and reporters gathered Thursday in Honduras to discuss issues of professional ethics in covering the violent street gangs blamed for a regional spike in murders.
Organized by the Miami-based Inter American Press Association, the conference got under way with a speech by Honduran President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.
He stressed the responsibility of the media and other elements of society in discouraging young people from joining gangs, known in Central America as “maras.”
The president, who took office late last month, said that poverty – which afflicts 80 percent of Hondurans – and lack of access to education and basic services contributes toward driving youths into the arms of gangs “associated with drugs and organized crime.”
Among those taking part in the two-day conference on Journalism, Violence and Gangs in Central America are IAPA chief and Washington Post Company Vice President Diana Daniels, government officials and newspaper editors from throughout the region and working journalists.
The event features panel discussions and the screening of filmed testimony by reformed gangsters and of a videotaped message from the director of international affairs for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Cresencio Arcos.
Mauro Cerbino, an anthropologist with the Latin American Federation of Social Sciences, led a seminar Thursday on the subject of media depictions of youth violence.
Editorial standards to be used in covering stories about violence and gangs were discussed by newspaper executives Jose Roberto Dutriz, of El Salvador’s La Prensa Grafica; Gonzalo Marroquin, of the Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre; and Jorge Canahuati, of Honduras’ La Prensa and El Heraldo.
Cerbino told EFE that the news media should go beyond reporting on the gang phenomenon and actively seek ways to help solve the underlying problems.
For example, he said that if the government in a given country rejects any notion of dialogue with the maras, “the role of the press is to propitiate that dialogue, unless you just want to echo a policy against it.”
Though none of Central America’s government maintains official statistics on gang membership, Salvadoran Interior Minister Rene Figueroa commented here to EFE that his country has some 10,000 gangsters, “distributed in the Maras Salvatrucha and 18.”
Mara Salvatrucha is a particularly violent criminal organization that evolved on the streets of Los Angeles during the 1980s, with most of its members young Salvadorans whose parents fled their nation’s civil war for the United States.
Because many of the gangsters were born in El Salvador, they were subject to deportation when rounded up during crackdowns in California in the 1990s. Sent “home” to a land they barely knew, they formed gangs in San Salvador that spread throughout that nation and to neighboring countries in Central America, where gangsters now engage in murder, drug dealing and kidnapping, among other offenses.
Guatemala’s interior minister, Carlos Vielmann, told EFE here that the maras in his nation display a “pyramidal organization,” with as many as 80,000 members at the base and roughly 8,000 hardcore “criminals and murderers” at the top.
Figueroa and Vielmann were joined Thursday by Honduran Security Minister Alvaro Romero in a presentation on the current shape of official policy toward gangs.
In El Salvador, conservative President Tony Saca has opted to carry on the hard-line approach of his predecessor. Honduras’ Zelaya, a centrist, is seeking dialogue with the maras while vowing he will not tolerate further violence.
Zelaya is taking a different tack from the man he replaced, Ricardo Maduro, who proclaimed “all-out war” against the gangs when he took office in 2002, but was unable to slow, much less halt, the rise in violence.
