This episode of Security Reimagined, WOLA’s podcast series on alternative approaches to security in Latin America, features two leaders of Cure Violence Global (CVG), a Chicago-based organization that applies a public health model to reducing community violence. Brent Decker, CVG’s chief program officer, joined the organization nearly 20 years ago after working on social justice and community health projects in Latin America. Guadalupe “Lupe” Cruz, who directs CVG’s Latin America programs, began as a violence interrupter in Chicago in 2009 and has since launched the model in communities across the Americas.
The conversation comes as polls and election results show people across the region so alarmed by violent crime that some are willing to surrender rights and freedoms in exchange for safety. Cure Violence offers a different path, and it reports striking results: a 90 percent drop in homicides in parts of Culiacán, Mexico; 45 percent less violent crime in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; a 74 percent drop in killings and a 95 percent drop in youth violence in Cali, Colombia; and 94 percent fewer shootings in parts of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
Decker explains the model’s origins with founder Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician who worked with the World Health Organization in Africa and Asia. The model rests on the premise that violence behaves like a disease. It clusters, it moves in waves, and it spreads from person to person as exposure to violence reshapes how people respond to conflict. CVG therefore borrows the three pillars of epidemic control: interrupting transmission by mediating conflicts and preventing retaliation, preventing future spread by working closely with the highest-risk individuals, and changing community norms about the use of violence. The model expanded to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which at the time had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. CVG now works in 12 communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, including sites in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, and Uruguay.
Both guests stress that CVG enters a place only when invited. The core model stays the same, but each implementation must be adapted to local realities. The most important step is finding credible messengers who already have access to people involved in violence.
Decker attributes the rapid results to the program’s narrow focus. It concentrates on the small number of people actively involved in violence in the hardest-hit communities. Much of the killing, he argues, stems from interpersonal conflict that is preventable even where transnational criminal organizations shape the broader context. The guests are candid about the model’s limits. It is not designed for armed conflict between groups and the state, and it does not replace police, justice, or prison reform. They see their work as “both/and,” not “either/or.” Decker points to New York City as evidence the model can work at scale: it has been part of the city’s crisis management infrastructure across several mayoral administrations.
Cruz shares stories from the field. An interrupter in Honduras vouched for a young man who had been seized after accidentally crossing an invisible territorial boundary, and brought him home safely. In Culiacán, teams have mediated extortion conflicts. In one community, a school’s enrollment has grown from 40 students to 500.
Both guests identify unstable funding and policy, not the community work itself, as obstacles. They say building local capacity is what lasts: trained interrupters, many of them survivors of violence, tend to keep doing the work whether or not a program is funded.
Download this podcast episode’s .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
