 I'm very pleased to moderate this panel this afternoon. We have around the table four people who I think can really give us wonderfully different sides of the different views of the elephant, who can help us to see how we have to come together to think about how we look at and address the complex challenges of violence that are undermining the lives of so many people in Mexico and people around the world. Although you have in your packets the long bios for each person, so I won't detail those. But just to give you a snapshot of the kinds of views we have around the table, Michelle Breslauer works with the Institute for Economics and Peace, which is known, of course, for the global peace indices, which is focused for years now on indices that have to do with violent armed conflict, particularly, and as although it's branched into other arenas recently. And this is now focusing the Mexico peace index, of course, is focusing on a country that's not formally at war but has a new kind of violence that's needed in war and in peace. And Enrique Betancourt, as an architect who's been specializing in violence and crime prevention, in an area that's the cusp between what we think of as armed conflict and what we think of as intimate violence and the role of violence in communities is an area where these two arenas overlap in very awkward and unmapped ways. And Miguel Alvarez comes to us from a long trajectory of work with what we would call structural violence, poverty, social inequality, the long history of life in so many countries that causes a range of violence from intimate family violence to the structural and symbolic violence that manifests in different ways in people's lives. And John Feely at the State Department, of course, is like many other policymakers sitting at a table in which he has to think about what to do with all these ranges of violence through concrete policy perspectives. And proposals. And this is one of the major challenges now is how to face the task of addressing violence that has a hybrid form and doesn't have clear and concise names and no clear boundaries now between X and YZ kinds of violences. The violence in Mexico is not simply criminal violence. It's not simply political violence. It's neither war nor is it peace. But just as Gertrude Stein told us about roses, violence is violence is violence. And so we have to figure out how to understand this phenomenon in a way that allows us to deal with it more holistically and more effectively than we've been able to do until now. And I just want to leave you, and then I'll turn it over to the first speaker, with a wonderful quote that I found very clarifying for me about the nature of the challenge. And he was quoting a member of the Peruvian Peace and Reconciliation Commission who said, in his reflections about the work that they had done, he said, I still remember the faces of the people from the rural areas that were coming to the commission's hearings. They explained how the violence had been the air they had breathed ever since they had arrived into this world, like the bread they eat each day. Excuse me for my course. They didn't understand why we were only interested in the violence from 1980 to 2000, only that practiced by the armed forces, only that practiced by the police and the other armed groups. The violence didn't come from the outside. It's intrinsic to the daily life of these people. For us, the violence was an affront to our dignity, the shock, a violation of our fundamental rights. For them, the violence is normalized, something they feel each time they breathe. Bridging this experiential chasm is, I think, one of the major pending tasks of people who are concerned with peacemaking and violence prevention in the world. And so I look very much forward to hearing the interventions of our panel. And we're going to start with Enrique and move in this direction. And so thank you very much to each of you. And each panelist will talk for about seven to eight minutes, and then we'll open it up for discussion. Thanks. Thanks, Tani. Thanks, everybody, for being here today. I have the difficult task of starting introducing this complex problem in this very complex country. But I will do it from the perspective that I have. I'll do it just very briefly using a powerful presentation just to show how, in my personal experience, I have addressed this problem from a practitioner's perspective, also from a policymaking perspective, and now from an international development perspective. The first thing to note, and it's probably something that is already known by all of you, is the process of how Mexico has really seen a tremendous increase in the amount of murders happening in the country for the last years. Up until 2007, Mexico was relatively reducing the murder rate in the country in a very sustainable way, like getting back all the way to 1910, more or less. So Mexico was doing well in terms of that trend, even though we know that there were certain structural problems happening in the country. 2007 marks the year in which this trend completely bounced back. And just to move very quickly forward to 2010, I want you to imagine yourselves in a meeting with the president. While we started dealing with these issues, we understood, first of all, that the problem of violence in Mexico was being concentrated in very specific places. Only 162 municipalities, out of more than 2000, concentrated 80% of the murder rate in the country. So the first big lesson about a problem that is perceived to be everywhere in Mexico is that violence is highly concentrated in some places. This problem was concentrated mostly in urban areas. And as much as you can see also in the United States, for example, or any other country almost in the world, that even concentrates in neighborhoods or even in micro-locations. So to give you an example, 2010 was a year in which we started and triggered a very comprehensive strategy. I was working at that time for the Mexican government in Ciudad Juárez. And even those days being at the most murderous city in the world, you could see, speaking of resilience, a city of 1.3 million inhabitants every day doing business, doing shopping, taking kids to school, and having a normal life, quote unquote. But there were no go-sons. So we understood that from the policy perspective, place was a very important thing to consider in terms of how to proceed. This is Ciudad Juárez. What you see in a more in a darker area is Ciudad Juárez is the urban fabric of Ciudad Juárez in 2000, in 1980. What you see as the whole is Ciudad Juárez in 2010. In this same period of time, Ciudad Juárez went from being, it grew twice in terms of population, but it grew six times in terms of size. If you put yourselves very quickly in the shoes of a mayor or in the shoes of the chief of police or in the shoes of the guy who's providing basic services to the city, you can start understanding how a lot of people were underserved in these places. This is the story of Ciudad Juárez, but this is not a typical from the rest of the country. This is a typical organization pattern that follows many of these places where the violence was being concentrated. If you wanted to understand more about Juárez, I mean, around this area is where the airport's here, city center's here. The violence was mostly concentrated in this area and in this area, right? So there were areas that you could really go like no matter what time, and there were areas that no matter what time you could not even visit. Very important graphic for me, this one that I'm here. So we were saying, Mexico's murder rate went from being eight to almost 18 as an average. Try to imagine yourselves now in a meeting with the president, and this actually happened. When someone starts addressing the president saying, Mr. President, we have a problem of, we have more than doubled our murder rate in this country in the last three, four years. We have to design a policy to address this problem. The fact that that was the conversation was very, very alarming for many of us because we were not addressing the nuances of the problem. We said, Mr. President, no, wait. The problem is that this problem is concentrated in certain places and within certain populations. Let's try to look into those details. So for example, instead of looking at the country as a whole, we started looking at how did it look like this rate for young men? The rate was not anymore 18.9, but 46 homicides per 100,000 for young men. If young men, as we know, don't only live in Mexico, but they live in a state, let's say Chihuahua, 2010, the murder rate for being young and men goes all the way up to 300. If you're based in Ciudad Juarez, then the rate goes all the way to 500 homicides per 100,000. This is just by being young and men. I'm not saying here you are part of a cartel, you just became a gang member, you have more risk factors associated to you. So the problem is that if we design policies to address this average problem, we will not at all understand the problem. We have to design solutions to address the problem at this scale. And this is something I think Tani also has done a lot in terms of explaining the conditions of chronic violence and those conditions really, really require a different kind of thinking and different type of policies. So just coming back very quickly to this notion of resilience and conflict, the sources and the potential solutions for those, I think you have to think in terms of, the discussion about resilience has been taking different paths. Depending who you speak with, they take into consideration violence, sometimes they don't. If you, I have been in conferences where resilience is completely attached to the discussion of the environment without taking into consideration, for example, violence. In other places violence is a central piece of resilience. I think it's very important to understand and make distinctions regarding resilience in terms of the individual, resilience in terms of the community, at the city level or even at the state level. And the type of responses we have to put in place to address this problem, I think have to do with, for example, at the individual level there's a lot. I think I saw something in the agenda that was discussed today on neuroscience and conflict. I imagine a lot of things were discussed around character. We found a lot, there's a lot of science behind the possibility of working character to really transform the way people interact with violence. At the community level, social cohesion and social norms, being able, if you are aware of the work of Nicolas Christakis and the social network mapping, and new, let's say, science, you will understand that you intervene in a social system in very particular moments with very particular members, you will be able to transform the way these people relate to each other and build resilience. At the city level, it's about the systems of the city. And at the national level, I think this is very important, it's about the perceived justice, procedural justice, and actual justice, the application of law enforcement. When we talk about peaceful solutions to violence, I think we have to bring into the conversation law enforcement. This is something we tried many times in Mexico not to touch on, to solve violence with social means. And I think one of the biggest lessons is you have to use law enforcement strictly following human rights procedures and everything, but law enforcement is really instrumental in the capacity of bringing down, reducing violence in the first place. And I think, I personally believe, that all of them can be addressed at the community level. At the end, when you have law enforcement intervening, you do see that at the community level. Individuals interact with each other at the community level, and cities also provide services at that scale. We, at least from my understanding, the potential solutions are completely based at this social and spatial scale. And for that, we've been developing for a number of years, I won't go into detail for this, but just like how do you introduce a blended approach, a place-based approach that blends in law enforcement and social prevention approaches. A number of different moments within this graph have been tried in Latin America, in Mexico, and the United States. You have focused deterrence in the United States, qualified territorial control through UPPs in Brazil, for example. There are secondary prevention schemes to address those who are at high risk. And then slowly moving forward, trying to reduce the presence of law enforcement all the way to community policing, and increasing and ramping up social prevention all the way to have primary prevention as mainstreamed. What we have done so far in terms of policy is start here. We want to start with social prevention and with community policing in places like the one that I showed before, in places where the murder rate, the social norms, everything is against you. And I think one of the big lessons in terms of prevention versus law enforcement is that we have to start reducing first the trends and the norms that are causing violence to the community level, and then slowly introducing other types of services to really sustain those reductions through time. That's how very quickly I try to draw a panorama of what Mexico is facing at this moment, but also come up with an idea of potential solutions that have been already tried in some contexts. Thank you so much. Well, thank you very much for having me here. Thank you, Tanny, for moderating this. Let me say that my comments are drawn from my personal observation. I was a diplomat in Mexico from 2000-2003. I returned and I was our Deputy Chief of Mission and then the Charger when we did have an ambassador there from 2009-2012. I say this because I want to clear that I am not an academic. I am a consumer of plenty of academic research, but most, as Tanny said, most of my observations come from the perspective of being a policymaker and a policy implementer and somebody who is interested in the root causes and the drivers, but whose daily bread is to try to find solutions with them. So when I look at Mexico and the study that I've done personally, I see that you could divide it in any number of ways, but the purposes of my intervention here, I see two general baskets of drivers of violence in Mexico. One of them is historical and societal and one of them is structural. The historical and the societal. And note that I don't say cultural. I've seen an awful lot of mostly press articles and folks that I think are doing bad analysis who will speak about the violent nature of Mexicans and the Mexican people. I firmly believe I worked in Colombia in the 1990s. I've worked in El Salvador. There is no one people who are more violent than any other group of people, but history and society do have a very profound impact on how the Peruvian gentleman described his experience of violence. So I think if you look historically, Mexico has a federal system. I have never lived in a country that has been less federally administered. It is more like Paris and France than it is the United States. I always thought of it as federal versus feudal. We live here in the United States with tremendous ignorance of Mexico and the history of Mexico. And we live in stereotypes. Mexico is an incredibly broad and deep and historic of various small societies. And I think that the manner in which a feudal system coexisted with a federal, a nominally federal government, gives you a glimpse into why violence in Mexico, particularly Mexican brand, has developed. One of the results of that is a history of very weak law enforcement. Nobody in Mexico ever wants to be a cop. Nobody ever born thinking I'm gonna be a cop and that's gonna be on kids' days in school. Cops don't go into the school, firemen don't go into the schools. They don't think of public service in a way that we do say in the United States or in other places where there is a career path where it's honorable, where that public service is considered something that should be cherished by society and supported by society. There in Mexico historically has been an inefficient and non-transparent judicial system. This is historical. Go back to the Napoleonic Code, to the Spanish there. Justice systems, not just in Mexico but throughout the rest of the hemisphere as well were set up not as it says in our system in the Supreme Court of the United States equal justice under the law but they were set up for the benefit and for the prerogatives of wealthy elites, period. And there's been no question about that and Mexico is in the middle of attacking this but remember changing a judicial system is like changing a democracy's stem cells. It's at the very core of what a society and a government is. You also had the 1910 revolution which had a tremendous effect on Mexico and the explosive violence that came out of that and the reaction to it. Mexico goes into a period of seven decades where one party governs and what is the principal value of that government? Stability. Stability above everything else. And so result what you end up with is a system that is again federal in name incredibly centralized in practice and an awful lot of inattention to the small feudal areas that grow up around there but all government authority is very concentrated in a presidentialist system. What does that lead to in terms of their foreign policy? A policy of non-interventionism. A policy that Mexicans will refer to as política de avestrusis. It's the ostrich that sticks its head in the sand. Pay no attention to what's going on in here. I'll pay no attention to you. As a result you end up with a very, very corrupt patronage type system and a foreign policy that purposely keeps the rest of the world at arm's length. Especially the United States because the last time we got in there we took one third of their country and they kind of still remember that. And we have difficulty as Americans understanding that. Why is the Mexican sense of sovereignty so heightened? Why is it so prickly? They're good historical reasons for it. All right, let's talk about the structural drivers of violence. If you take a look at the development and here I'm referring only to organized crime and narco trafficking and there are many types of violence and obviously we can get into it later. For many years, Columbia controlled the cocaine business. If you all go back, cocaine cowboys and Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel, et cetera. They made the product. It only grows in three or four countries in the Andes. They made it, they shipped it and they distributed it in the United States. How did they ship it? Originally they shipped it through the Caribbean and that's the Miami Vice-Days and when U.S. law enforcement began to react to that and shut off the Caribbean route, they started coming up the Isthmus. That gets you right up through Central America, gets you into Mexico. The Mexicans, or I should say the Colombians as they began to partner with the United States and they did 90% of the work, both financially and in terms of the blood sweat treasure that they put into getting a handle on Columbia's narco violence and the almost failed state nature of Columbia in the 1990s and early 2000s. As they do that, the cartels become weaker and you hear about the atomization or the development of the mini cartels. There's no longer a Pablo Escobar, there's no longer a Rodriguez or a Wayla brothers in Cali. There's no cartel that dominates. So what do the Mexicans do? The Mexicans go in, the Mexican bad guys I should say, go in and they begin to transform themselves from subcontractors who did transportation only up to the U.S. border where they turned the cocaine over to Colombian distributors in the United States and that's where all the money is made. They basically became wholesalers. They took it off the wharfs in Buenaventura, they took it from La Guajira and they said, thank you, we'll take it from here. What that results in is a tremendous expansion of the distribution networks in the United States. When I was a kid growing up in New York, Jackson Heights was the epicenter of Colombians and that's where cocaine came to and was distributed from. You look across most of the United States, most of the coke and then you've got to add heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana as well is distributed by Mexican controlled gangs reporting back to a cartel. And this also is a driver of violence because the word, the very word cartel, couldn't be a greater fallacy. Their cartels are economic groups that collude to fixed prices and markets. The last thing these guys do is fix prices and markets and cooperate. What they do is they kill each other at the cyclic rate to take over the plazas. They try to, by force of arms intimidation, they try to push one guy out, push the other guy in. Famous group of enforcers called La Lina was the Juarez cartel that sought to draw a line and say, the Sinaloa guys come no further than here. Tremendous violence as a result of that. And you have other violence that has resulted as the dispersion of the cartels. There was a time when there was a Guadalajara cartel and there was sort of like a five families New York Mafia arrangement, that's long, long gone. But you look at other types of violence that they go into, extortion, kidnapping, carjacking, arms trafficking, et cetera. Another undeniable cause of the violence in Mexico from 2007, eight on has been the flooding of weapons and mostly illegally exported from the United States into Mexico. That is a result, or that is a result of the incredible accumulation of money. Instead of money being repatriated back to Columbia for the cocaine primarily, it goes to Mexico. They have more disposable cash. They buy higher grade weapons. Resilience, let me give you a couple of reasons for guarded optimism. The governmental response, when President Calderón comes in for the very first time, we see an extended hand that says, look, I got a serious problem. Mexico cannot become the genuine first world type of country we envision in its potential, which the United States fully shares. If it allows for the existence, coexistence of organized criminal gangs like this that create this kind of violence. And again, they're not the only drivers of violence. I'm only talking about them right now. So we get that and what Calderón does is very interesting. He says, and it's not because we can't handle it on our own. It's because you owe us this. Your market in the United States, your illegal weapons are part of why our cartels have become so empowered. We say, you're absolutely right, ergo the birth of the term co-responsibility in regards to US-Mexico law enforcement cooperation. It's a great thing. It's also an incomplete thing. There's a lot of disinformation about Merida. I will only say here, but I'm happy to take questions later. It is not not a security strategy. It is a comprehensive whole of government rule of law strategy. And there are four pillars. And the fourth pillar is building strong and resilient communities. And much of what Enrique said and what my colleagues will say, I know that I will agree with. And we are working on that. I will also say that it's not just the government's job. Getting a handle on violence and reducing violence has civil society and ordinary citizens have a tremendous role to play. And here we go back to some of the organizational, I'm sorry, some of the historical. And again, I'm not going to use the word cultural, but the historical and societal attitudes and mentalities. Enrique just used the word character. Think about some of, and those of you who may know Mexico or be Mexican will recognize these right-of-ways. Think about some of the language that's used in Mexico when you're a kid or growing up in what you learn. El que no transa, no avanza. If you're not scheming, you don't get ahead. Un político pobre es un pobre político. One of their most famous politicians said that. A poor politician, meaning no money, is a bad politician. La morbida, right? The little tax you pay when you want to get a service done. You want to get a license, it costs you a little bit extra. You want to get your milk delivered faster, a little bit extra. These aren't tips. These are sort of institutional, what Jorge Castaneda calls corrupción de ventanilla. Small scale service window kind of corruptions. Think of the way in which Mexicans use the term galloso. Galloso is only Mexican slang. It means somebody who is really smart and knows how to get ahead by getting around the rules. So it all comes back to rule of law. The final thing I'll say, because Lynn would just shut the one minute sign at me. Think of this. Anybody who's been to the border knows that there's a tremendously homogenous vaide population. They're Mexicans, they're Americans, they're Mexican Americans, they're legal, they're illegal. It's the same people wherever you go across that border. Families are divided by a border. They like to say, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. It's very, very true. So if you have the same people with the same sorts of values, and you take any pair of sister cities, Brenosa, McAllen, you have more guns on the United States side. They're legal. You can go to Billy Bub's gun shop and you can buy one. You have more dope on the US side. That's where the market is. That's where the markup is the highest. And you actually have, in most cases, not all, but in most cases, higher populations of the same poorly educated sort of dead-ender types on the US side than you do on the Mexico side. So why do you not have grenades thrown at City Hall and McAllen, but you do in Brenosa? Why do you have the spectacular violence on the Mexican side and not on the US side? And the answer I believe is very simple. It boils down to rule of law. It boils down to impunity. And then understanding, a societal understanding that if I commit a crime, if I engage in violent behavior on the Mexican side, I have statistically less than a 2% chance of being caught in sanction for it, not the case in the United States. I think that that was actually a very good segue to sort of what I'm going to speak about with my few minutes, because as Tanny mentioned, I'm coming here from the Institute for Economics and Peace. So what we are trying to do as an organization is to put metrics around peacefulness and to use those measures to try to understand levels of peace, drivers of peace, and the economic impacts of peace. So I'm going to be coming a little bit more from a data perspective to talk about resilience and positive peace in Mexico today. And I think what we've found in our work is that the findings of our recent studies in Mexico support the types of comments that John was making and that Enrique was making before. And I hope that that is helpful too for people in the room who are more on the advocacy or programmatic side. I think one of the panelists earlier today spoke about everybody speaking to like-minded people in this type of field. And so I'm assuming everybody in this room is a like-minded person and hopefully I can provide a little bit more quantitative information that will be helpful in furthering what I hope is a shared goal. As you know, we produce the Global Peace Index every year and so that looks at peacefulness across 162 countries. But we've been really fortunate to be able to produce two editions of a Mexico peace index where we can look at a subnational level. And what we're doing there is we're bringing together a range of variables. So we're looking at indicators like homicide, organized crime, justice efficiency, and community. And we're working with administrative data sets and victimization surveys to present this type of snapshot of the 32 states. Sorry, I'm just gonna grab this from you. And here's a timeline. It's similar to what you saw in terms of the trend in homicide rates that Enrique presented. What I wanna point out, and this includes all seven indicators, is that what we've learned from aggregating this data from 2003 to 2014 is that perhaps we're in a moment of opportunity and transition for Mexico. So I think that the graph of homicides that we looked at before stopped in 2009 or 2010, you'll see that same sort of spike here where violence has increased, but then it's lowering in recent years. But that lowering of violence is starting to plateau. So we saw this rapid increase from 2005 to 2011, but from 2011 to now, we've seen a 16% increase in peace, but that's only 0.7% in the last year. So really, this means that we're at a crossroads point for Mexico in terms of violence. Mexico can't sustain or build on these gains in peacefulness unless it can really make substantial investments. And these investments really need to move beyond viewing the problem simply as one of violence containment. And I think that's what we saw in Enrique's presentation is that it is a systems approach. It is looking at various levels of society. And what I would say is that it needs to look at building a resilient and sustainable peace system. And that's a complicated strategy. And it requires long-term thinking. It requires participation across civil society and government. And it requires an understanding about the conditions in which peace thrives. So thinking about what that optimal environment is that actually helps mitigate violence and sustain peace, my organization would describe this as an environment with higher levels of positive peace. And we're using positive peace to describe the attitudes, institutions, and structures that are associated with more peaceful societies. So this is a model that we've developed of eight factors identified through statistical and empirical analysis of thousands of data sets at the global level. It's meant to represent a holistic framework and an interrelated framework of the drivers of peace. Now, countries that have stronger representation of these eight factors tend to be more peaceful. They tend to have better development outcomes and they're more resilient. And now, understanding what is defined as resilience is another challenge, but here we mean that they're better able to withstand shocks, whether they're economic, political, environmental. And when we compare levels of positive peace in a country to levels of violence, we can begin to determine countries that either have a peace surplus, meaning they have a greater potential to improve their levels of peace or a peace deficit, meaning that they're at a higher risk of falling into violence. And from a global perspective, Mexico is in a unique position to improve its peace. Its potential for peace, as the data shows, and that's measured by the strength of institutions compared to global averages, is greater than its actual peace levels would suggest. So there is some opportunity there. And when we look at this framework, then, in the context of the states of Mexico, and we've been slightly limited by data here, so we're looking at the state level and we developed a Mexico positive peace index. And that's to try to understand which of these eight very broad categories are most relevant to peace. So we took 58 state level indicators and we found that for Mexico, peace is strongly associated with three factors. While functioning government, low levels of corruption, and good relations with neighbors. But what does this really mean? Indicators of deprivation, such as poverty and low education levels, these are still important factors and they're still related. But they're not the priority for peace building in Mexico today and I think that's what we heard from John. These factors indicate that we should look at things in Mexico to strengthen perceptions of local safety, confidence in the government, and justice system to improve public safety, lowering levels of corruption, and increasing community participation in local problem solving. So while tackling corruption and governance are clearly priorities, what's important to note here is that this also moves us beyond thinking solely in terms of government performance as an indicator and to include citizen engagement and social capital as predictors of peace. And you can find these spaces for engagement across the states. You see citizens reporting even in states with very high levels of violence where people could be apathetic that they have a great willingness to contribute to peaceful solutions. So what this data is showing then is that it starts to provide a roadmap for various levels of policy for activism and for programming. And it encompasses things that are happening in Mexico like implementing a new justice system, like professionalizing local police services, implementing anti-corruption measures, creating spaces for citizen reporting and transparency, developing safe community spaces with light fixtures, parks, community centers. So there are these spaces for opportunity and for concentration. I think that as a peace building community we see that violence has a tremendous social impact that there are tragedies going on in Mexico, that Mexico is in the papers constantly beaten down by high levels of violence internationally. But we need to also think about where there are areas to engage and we need to convince all levels of society from private sector to government that there are real areas for policy change. And if you need one final thought to convince your private sector partner, there are clear economic gains. The economic impact of violence in Mexico last year was three trillion pesos, that's 17% of Mexican GDP. Businesses report 4% of their operating costs going to violence containment. So if somebody isn't swayed by the humanitarian argument perhaps they'll be swayed by the economic one. Thank you. I'm very glad. I'm very glad to be the last because thanks to what my colleagues class have put on the table, I will try to make a sort of hypothesis or of knockdown reflections. Of course, being for you the most representative here of Mexican civil society, especially of that one more independent, critical and alternative. Well, first, we have a very strong debate on what is the main character of the actual crisis in Mexico. And I find eight positions. From those who consider that the nation itself is the one in crisis that we are in so high grade of dependence that Mexico is not anymore but symbolic framework. Passing by the crisis of state, of political regimen, economical model, et cetera, et cetera, crisis of security, crisis of justice and human rights, eight positions. But my hypothesis is that the problem is that behind each position we have a very dispersed energy and our main challenge now is how to build up a common general agenda of what are the main root steps to go on, even with our differences. But if we can reach at this moment the general common agenda, we are still working in a very scattered process which doesn't help us go to the bottom. Second, I agree, since Stani said it, of course we have different drivers of violence. Six, coming from the structural, coming from those because of the spoliation of land of resources, et cetera, et cetera. Including, of course, the one of the combat of, against the criminal organizations, including the 24 crimes, not only drug trafficking and producing. But here the main problem is that we don't have, again, a common diagnosis. We have clarity of the different maps of each kind of violence, but we don't have a common combination of the maps that help us to understand a deeper diagnosis. And of course, may be possible for us to be kind of a deeper structure. We don't have that approach and, again, the main vision of Mexican government is related to security, not to the rest of the causes, not to the rest of kinds of violence, and therefore the Mexican government strategy has not, is not being enough to resolve and to understand the complexity of Mexican violence. It's a pity to say, but, of course, not as historical culture, but violence as way of resistance is being converted some regions in Mexico. So things are getting worse and worse, and, again, we need, again, new diagnosis, new strategy. And for us, a civil society, a challenge is not how to be invited to the meetings and to the reflections where the government make. We are trying to explain them come to our vision. It's not only how you use us to support your vision or legitimize your strategy. We need to accept us not only as another actors, but another vision and other way to understand this, and we are not fitting like this. Formal acceptance of Mexican society in these issues is very formal. It is getting better, but it is not enough. Here we have historical challenge. Third, Ayotzinapa is a central point of Mexican moment now. What happened there? If only a local, probably related to organized crime. Or if the state itself has been re-weld there, and the consequence of what is the root of transformation that Ayotzinapa needs to be understood and resolved, explain the very tense and crucial moment we are living. And from now, we have a discussion of different... tenories, but this year, 2015, we are considered to be a very strategical year because five crises are to be included in the Mexican moment. And the dispute on who is wanted to conduct the path to resolve this new crisis is explaining us what is happening nowadays. The economical crisis, the political crisis because of the insufficiency of the political dialogue, the electoral crisis, and especially because of the untrust, untrust on political parties. The crisis on credibility, the rivated of the corruption information we have known the crisis, the security crisis, even places that have been controlled, now they are getting again in awful situation and the more clear crisis in human rights. And therefore, we feel that with this crucial moment and with this risk and challenge, this year is our maybe first... Say, that is when you have break on the set of match points. We are reaching a match point. The exact moment that if there is to be a new strategy, a national, historical initiative, this is our moment. We are very weak at receiving government states. We are facing this challenge being very little. There's not enough in maturity in vision and proposals. But I would like you to understand we have a very important opportunity. The problem is there are no leaderships. Nobody seems to be able to convince us. So maybe that will help us to a very collective proposal. And for the final, of course for us in Mexico, peace building has a lot to do related to state building. But for us, beside that, it is a major effort of society building. We have convinced that and Juarez is exactly where this experience was born. In the epicenter of violence, Juarez is recognized as the epicenter of social participation. That when civil society is arising, then there are keys and ways and paths and changes and alternatives. So now we have learned that our moment is passing through creating subjects, mature, any kind of actors, community, people, friends. We are living a very intensive and diversified moment of mobilization. Maybe it's not clear at the media, even in Mexican media, but please have the good knew that we are now in a very strong and diversified moment of expressions. And for us, our proposal is not only peace with security. We are trying to restart the deep comprehension of the paradigm of peace with justice, peace with inclusivity, peace with ethics, peace as a way of transforming Mexico. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. It was a very rich set of panels. I appreciate it. I'm gonna hold my questions, which are several and open it to the audience. We'll take three questions and ask for a round of responses. Patricia? We know that, which is not a big mystery. Then why, in your view, are some of the initial steps to move in a different direction? Because that's telling us that, and I said it's not that complicated, I complimented it so I know it sort of makes perfect sense. But what would be then that the steps that you've seen through your experience that need to take place to change the order of things that perhaps give us hope that something can move in a different direction? Yes. I have Mark Hamilton with the Inter-American Defense College. I was there last week. And thank you very much for your presentation. So my question has to do with what roles do you see today that these institutions are playing and what roles should they play moving forward? Same as I did, in the Mexican Navy, the Mexican Army, the federales, the municipal, and then civil society, something like those in the studies. What are the relationships that those actors have now and the roles they play and what roles should they play as we move forward in this? So hearing the themes of institutional violence, bias, perhaps, policing, opportunities for community policing in Mexico, some of you also mentioned micro levels of violence, micro levels of peace. And then we were talking, excuse me, Mexico, but it made me think about the U.S. action in the one we're seeing here, so I just like to open that question. Did you have a question? Yeah, I mean, I summarize some of the themes I heard in talking about Mexico and I was sitting here thinking, I get it, for Mexico, but what does it mean here in our country with some of the events we've seen more recently than really a history and a culture of bias, perhaps, and police force racism? Now would you like to start? Sure. Let me start with the first one, Patricia, and thank you, I think much of what I think is in the solution we've discussed here. The first, I think, is the absolute need to rebuild trust between the governed and the governor's, and that is at every single level. Mexico, to a certain extent, suffers, I believe, from a very presidentialist history, a very presidentialist system. There is a belief that if the president himself is not attending to your problem, and we saw this recently, you see it, we saw it with Ayotinapa, how long it took for the president to meet, how long it took for the president to engage directly with him. There's a sense almost of the old, it's historical, and this is also throughout the rest of Latin America, and it's also true here in the United States to a certain degree. If my particular problem of violence isn't being attended to by the president personally, I'm not getting the appropriate government response. You've got to change that culture, and you have to understand that the response has to come out of something like D'Alo Somos Juarez. So when you get, and Mexicans are real good, at going to the streets. I mean, if you take a look at, you know, the tragedy of Javier Cecilia and his son, and you look at how Mexicans, and this was part of the governing deal under the pre, you can march all you'd like. Just don't break any rice bowls of the elites. Don't try to make any structural changes. Mexico historically does not have a strong civil society, and as I think Miguel has said, it's beginning to emerge. I see that as a very positive indicator. The second thing has to be, when you talk about the relationship between the governed and the governors and trust, you have to have community involvement to be able to do things like call in 911s, denuncias in Spanish, the idea that people are willing. I used to tell this to people all the time. How many of you who live in Juarez or who lived in conflicted areas in the very small areas, if you had a brother who all of a sudden was involved in something that you knew was fishy, all crime is local, everybody has family, and Latin Americans in particular have enormously strong family values. If all of a sudden your brother starts to drive a much nicer car, starts to sport a Rolex watch, starts to have a lot of cash that he's flashing around, and you know something is happening, how many of you would go and tell the local police? Now, the first answer I would always get is, well, I'd never tell the police because they're probably corrupt too. That's cheating. How many of you would find out a way to get to your brother or how many people just sort of accept that, pues, el que no transa no avanza? And please God, I'm gonna go to the Virgen de Guadalupe and I'm gonna pray that my brother's okay. And then your brother turns up missing and you find out there was a shoot. That's micro, that's incredibly micro, but that gets replicated over and over and over in the barrios that Enrique was showing up there in Juarez. And the final thing I would say is that you absolutely have to change the justice system and Mexico is in the process of doing that. And if you take a look at the four states that have completely implemented the new penal code and work now in an accusatorial system, which just structurally is better. You know, I'm not trying to diss Napoleon and his code, but a Napoleonic code of justice is like tailor made for suborning, intimidating, et cetera. When you have open trials, when you have evidence that's put in front of people and Mexico is changing, they're not going to a jury system but they're going to an open accusatorial system, you build that confidence. Things like alternate drug courts, which we are working on with them have a tremendous level of effectiveness. So it's not, there's no one panacea but it all boils down in my mind to recreating spaces where there is trust between the governed and those who are governing them. And I would argue that it has to be met in the middle. There's no one thing. This is also true historically of Mexicans. There is a sense that my government owes me. Historically, why? Because that's what the pre-created, the old pre created an idea that I will pay you to vote for me. I will put you on a bus to go and vote for me. And then I will give you what you need. And the idea of social mobility in Mexico 50, 60, 70 years ago was nil where you were born is where you died. You did what your father did. It was very little social mobility unless you came to the States. That has to change. And I think it is changing. The final thing I'll say is the investment that has to be made in this. It cannot be all governmental. It must come from the private sector. It must come from creating places where people can... I've never met a Mexican who doesn't have three jobs. I say that not jokingly. Everybody has a main job. Everybody has two secondary jobs. They work in the informal sector. You have to restructure tax codes. You have to get people involved in the formal sector. You have to have them banking. You have to create trust and a social compact that is in the process. I am optimistic that it's happening. But I also think it has to be generational. It's not gonna happen overnight or in one political administration, whether it's US or Mexico. I wanna address Marx and a little bit of Patricia's question with one answer. I think in the landscape of things and the efforts that the Mexican government has been trying to put together also in cooperation with the United States and talking about the four pillars. I believe that we're still missing a unified theory of change. If you follow the implementation of the four pillars, for example, and you map them out, you won't find that they are geographically connected, for example. That's just one example of how that works. And I think that I'm using that example because it's completely mimicking what happens inside the Mexican government. If you go to the Mexican government and you show up in the crime prevention under ministry and you try to find the linkage they have to this process of improving the judicial system, you won't find a connection. If you go there and you say, well, what's the connection you have with federal police? Very weak, some meetings, obviously. There's people talking to each other, but not necessarily there's someone saying, okay, this is a complete idea of how we will address this problem. Yes, it has to happen at every level. It has to, like, governments tend to be big. So you might have people thinking and working in the long-term judicial reform, thinking in 20, what's that, 12, 2016 for the judicial, but expecting results to be in place in 2020, for example. But you need people to start thinking on a Jocinapa, right? You need people to address human rights issues today. So you have to really come up with a sound strategy that is bringing together different time frames, different geographies, and within that theory of change, I think there's room, obviously, to identify where the Navy, the Army have a role, but mostly I think the big, big gap we're facing today and the one that we're lagging on is police reform. I feel police reform, especially at the local level, there's no way the federal police will be able to cover those gaps. The discussion today about making police, bringing police at the state level or the local level, I think it's a very important discussion to have. There's no one-size-fits-all, I think, for a country as diverse as Mexico. I know the Colombians did well with the national police, but that's not a federation like the one that John described. So I believe this is a very important discussion and the role of police, again, I'm not a police, I'm not a super fan of police necessarily, but I strongly believe that if we do not improve law enforcement in Mexico, we won't be able to see the results that we want to see. We are advancing, I think, in different directions. That's my take on that. Very quickly also, I have had experience and the opportunity of being in the United States for the last year and a half. I spent last year in New Haven, Connecticut. I've been working a lot with David Kennedy at John Jay College, seeing the implementation of their strategies, particularly in New Haven, on focus deterrence. So I have also had a chance of walking the streets of New Haven as much as I had the chance of walking the streets of Ciudad Juarez. And to tell you the truth, I see a lot of similarities. When you, at the end, when you are in a community, in New Haven or in Ciudad Juarez, and you're talking to a group of kids in the street, the kind of feeling, the kind of driver that they have in themselves to be involved in violence is exactly the same. The idea of respect, the idea of belonging, the idea of honor are very present in young people everywhere in the world. And when these concepts and these ideas in themselves are very low, when they have very low self-control, you will see the type of violence we see either in Baltimore or in Ciudad Juarez, especially when you address the local level. Obviously you have other structural drivers, but I try to think also in terms of where do you start? You have root causes of violence and you have triggers of violence. You have things that really, really trigger violence. Where do you start? And I think we have made so many efforts on addressing root causes that we sometimes forget. And this is something the US is doing really well to understand the nuances of intervening right before violence is about to explode. And then creating the space for other services to chip in and address root causes. I think with this I would like to try to explain that there are a lot of similarities and there's so much at the local level that Mexico has to learn from what the US has done to reduce for 20 years now the murder rate. Thank you. Let's take three more questions. Do you think we could go a little bit late? Would you have this permission? Yes, please. I will take three more questions and I think we'll have to be a little bit succinct this time around. Thank you. What big range of association with the survey and under many other views came up with the perceptions of people internationally and looked at and tested and I feel tested as a positive. And we got their perceptions as to what the status was or is a particular elements within the so-called stability sectors, governance, disparity, global law, economics, and social welfare. And being able to see where those things fall in terms of location within the overall context of what I've put towards a sustainable, positive peace continuum. Again, this is in specific relation to peace and stability operation environments which is a different scenario. However, there are many commonalities and one that Mr. Kandara mentioned about a lack of a common diagnosis and overall strategy and picture where things stand and where they go. Okay, we'll have to wrap up. Well, what I'm wondering is that perspective, that framework might be helpful in addressing the kind of issues you're giving with the in terms of common framework, common perspective and how to track things and track it and move it forward to positive peace and stability. Thank you. This question, you and then. Very briefly, thank you very much. And specifically, perhaps, you were talking about the drivers of peace and the civil society. I didn't know if anyone mentioned anything about the role of the Church and the Catholic Church. Where is that? Is that a drive-up? What are the base communities? What about the rural structure, depends on the Church in the rural area? What about the Virgin in the Evangelical? Where do all the things sit in? What do they contribute to the process of peace or to bringing a private race? Thank you. Yes. Shine Church of Corruption and Criminal Justice. Two of the presentations are really used to specifically reference social norms. And John, at the end, I heard you make illusions to social norms rather than fantastic quotes that you gave, because those are indicators of some of the under-and-year-olds and expectations. Yet we haven't heard very much said about how you use and you work with social norms in the solutions. And I wonder, what are you saying as you're programming to shift social norms? And or what would you like to see? Maybe Carbone-Teddon with the San Diego side of the question has to do with communitarian police, particularly in whatever state, but also around the country. And then, in some cases, the emergency source is one of the recent work that we've done with that project, civil society is coming together. I would suggest that, Michelle, would you like to respond? And then, if each of you would like to take one minute, maximum, and then we'll let Miguel close up. I just wanted to go back quickly to Jessica's question about the US versus Mexico. And I think what's interesting here is that, first of all, I'm glad that you asked that question. I was in a lot of conferences around peace the last couple of weeks. And there's been very much a kind of this is something that we're dealing with in other countries and looking at really very fragile situations. And I've seen a big gap in making the parallels between issues that are going on in the US right now and what's going on just south of our border or in other countries. And I agree with John and Enrique. And I just wanted to add that I think there's a big, one of the words that we haven't said in terms of thinking about inclusivity is also about fairness. And that's a big issue with police and the populations they're policing with ports and the populations that they are trying is that people feel that the system in which they're operating is fair. So it's a just system to them. And if they feel like they're not included, that they are a population that is out of the system and that they aren't being treated fairly, then those are trigger type issues. And I think this is something that we see very clearly happening in the US right now. And would behoove us to pay a little bit more attention to thinking about maybe our own as Americans, who those of us who are, American moment of trying to address some of these issues. Perhaps we are also in crisis there. Community policing is used across a variety of areas. It's used in peace building. It's used now more and more in countering violent extremism programs. It is a resource and it's not perfect. And it's different in different scenarios. But it is a way to try to create more inclusivity. Another point on that just is around really the role of corruption and increasing trust. And what we've seen at the global level mirrors what we're seeing in our work in Mexico is that corruption is a key driver of violence. Lower levels of corruption help sustain greater levels of peacefulness. And it's particularly corruption in the police and rule of law forces that has the strongest impact. So rebuilding trust between police and citizens and those who are governing and those who are governed is key. Thinking about the role of churches, I don't think that the role of churches should be considered a driver of peace in this context. Churches and faith can be a channel for an interfaith dialogue or for peaceful negotiations or for citizen engagement. But I don't think that you see a relationship between higher levels of faith or higher number of churches and faith actors and higher levels of peacefulness necessarily. OK, one minute. I'll go real fast. Mary, you gave yourself away. You worked a lot in Central America. Base community is not a term that's used in Mexico. Remember, Mexico, very unique history, very secular state. You had the Criestados. You had a history of the church being, like all things, under the old pre-system relegated to its space. And point of fact, I would say, and this is anecdotal, and it's my opinion. This is not an official government opinion. I actually think that the Catholic Church, and I'm Catholic, hurts in the sense that what you find is the syncretism of Malverde, the patron saint of the Norco traffickers, the syncretism of folks who actually, and this happened in Colombia as well with, you know, Nuestra Señora de los Cicarios, our lady of the assassins, that allows for a church superstructure. The church is still enormously powerful, regardless of the secular nature of Mexico's governance for the last 100 years. But, you know, you have Norco traffickers who live to get their kid baptized by, you know, high-ranking priests. They do it, and then they get their pictures in the Mexican edition of Ola Magazine. I have not seen the church as a driver. In those small instances, the vast majority, obviously, of Catholic Church, is not involved in that. They do marvelous work in Mexico. But they have stayed in sort of a parochial role, traditional role, and they, I have not seen them step out in the way in which, when you go back to John Sabrina and the people in the Salvador and, you know, liberation theology, that, to me, in my observation has not played a huge role. With regard to social norms, we do a tremendous amount of work with Mexico at Mexico's invitation working through the Merida Initiative in that pillar four on culture of lawfulness. And this is something that has been enormously tested, enormously successful. We are fortunate in the Mexican context that you really don't have, like you did in Bosnia, you don't have sectarian or ethnic or religious lines to cross. But you do have that tremendous culture of non-lawfulness that has been ingrained over 80 years. If you did it in Great Britain, the same thing would happen. Speaking to police reform, if you remember, you know, anyone who's ever been to London and you see the Bobbys with the little hat on, they come from, the term Bobby comes from Sir Robert Peel, who reformed the British police. It's a fascinating history. If you go and you look at that, if you look at what they did in New York City, and I come from a family of cops and firemen, I am pretty big on cops. But I recognize that my uncles who were cops were not enlightened cops. They were the kinds of guys who went to work with an us versus them attitude. Look at all of the work that has been done. And this gets to your question, Amy, about communitarian police. Very simply, because I don't want to abuse the clock, communitarian police, bad. Community police, good. If it doesn't come from a structure of governance, in general, self-protection forces, we saw them all throughout Central America, Campesino groups who admittedly are stepping up to do protection. That's basically the mafia. That's how in New York City where I grew up, that's what you had, you had enforcers. So I could go and walk into Bensonhurst at 2 a.m. in 1975 and know that nothing would happen to me because I look like me. I don't look like her. If she walked in as an African-American, you'd have serious trouble. That won't happen if you have genuine community policing. And I would also just make an observation, and I'm not an expert on this either, but if you took a look at many of the cops in Baltimore who were attempting to prevent the violence, they were African-American. I think the trust that gets built, now Bosnia may be a different scenario in where you do have ethnic and religious sectarian lines that go back a millennia, it's a little tougher challenge. But I think that the whole key has to be professional police who have a career path who are rewarded for what they do, which is to impose law and order, I shouldn't say impose, that create who create the conditions for law and order, respecting human rights, respecting the legitimate grievances of populations. When you get to there, it doesn't matter the national origin of the person wearing the uniform, what matters is the trust that they can build. Very quickly on the norms, I believe there's a great opportunity obviously tweaking the incentives and there are approaches like the focus deterrence approach that blends in at the same time the threat of the state, the enforcement with social opportunity and the moral voice of the community. So those three factors really help to change the trend. I also believe that combining that with the new science of social network analysis allows you to understand much better how people, how groups really interact, how they cooperate, how those systems really interact. Very important concept I think, just to leave it there, resilience can be positive. I mean, corruption is a form of resilience, if you understand it to the most detailed level and just understanding that sometimes resilience has to be really informed by positive resilience. And with that I also touch with the idea of the communitarian police. Obviously the communitarian police is a resilient response of a group of people who are in the need of defending themselves. I agree with the idea that it's not something you want in a culture of, you want to build the rule of law when you have to be the state of rule of law. I'm going to let Miguel Alvarez, who has given a little bit more time to first some last thoughts. Thank you. Thank you. Six Twitter style comments. First, the main rule we should change is related to the need of the transformation of our political regimen because there is where our program is programmed, the whole way to generate power, impunity, eruption, authoritarianism. Second, how to be able to reach that condition of overview, diagnosis, and strategy? For me the central issue is how to put together, how to resolve the disface between the drug dose in Mexico, which is very strong, very dangerous in height, with very different thematics, with the first drug, which is very weak, only with political parties. If we find how to reach conditions for a dialogue, maybe we can be able to do that. Third, to understand new Mexican society, maybe the point is not, please don't look at that phenomenon in the institutional field. Like institutions. Happening outside temples, cultural new alternatives or new politics. It's happening not in the institutional. So we need to understand new spaces, new faces, maybe not in the traditional ways. Four, for Mexican it is very similar to what happened to Latin American church. We suffered a very strong policy of Pope Juan Pablo to control every bishop or religious leader. Community related to theology of liberation. But still, classical based communities and good experiences are there and we have very hope that we, Francisco and San Romero, the shining of the church with these processes will help that the religious factor becomes stronger for the unification of efforts. Five, I am personally the mediator of some of the experience of the political, the communitarian police in Guerrero to the government and to experience in another sites of Mexico. I consider to be four models but related to assisting of justice has been successful. The other, more immediate response have been weak for support the tension. And final, yes, I accept Mexico as a very difficult, historically cultural, maybe psychologically relation with US. Yes, I accept we have a challenge. But please accept that from this side, many times we find solidarity, but we don't find the interest of understanding our issues as common issues. And if we are able that common problems that we now face all the demonstrations not only in Baltimore from three years from now you have faced this phenomenon. We will be most happy to be able to talk and we will tell you again about this. So we have a easy challenge on how to make breach or how to make fruitful, something like that. I want to thank the panelists. It's very rich and diverse discussion and the audience for very good questions and in exchange. Thank you very much. Thanks Tani as well for moderating great discussion as well as a panelist. And for all the participants, I want to invite you outside. We are going through our gallery walk. These are photographs and artwork contributed both by Alliance for Peacebuilding board member Dr. Tom Furrah and our USIP Afghanistan team. Each piece of work is a reflection on a landscape throughout the world where peace building is underway and success is being made. In particular our USIP Afghanistan team has a rich display of photographs that depicted the work that we did with our local partners to bring about a relatively peaceful and violence free election process this year. Thank you very much for your participation today and we look forward to continuing the dialogue in day two and three.