Since 1997, Monica Zalaquett, a Chilean journalist and psychologist who emigrated to Nicaragua more than 40 years ago, has been working to dismantle gang violence by focusing on what she considers its root: machismo. For her, machismo is “a pathology, it is not normal and healthy masculinity, it is a distortion, a deviation from healthy masculinity.”
At this time of a new awakening of feminism in the world, it is becoming more recurrent to speak publicly of the impact of machismo on men and masculinity. The Pan American Health Organization even published last year the report “Masculinities and Health in the Region of the Americas” in which they analyze the health of men in the region from a gender perspective. So they conclude that men live 5.8 years less than women. The report says this is an “over mortality” among men that begins in adolescence “and triples in early adulthood.”
“The main causes of mortality in men include interpersonal violence, trauma caused by traffic and liver cirrhosis, all of which are linked to the exercise of hegemonic masculinity (…) Men’s health and well-being is the product of multiple factors, among which the construction of masculinity stands out,” explains the report’s summary.
Monica Zalaquett has been digging into the factors that damage masculinity for 22 years, focusing on the violence in all of its forms as a result. She has been undoing violence from its most primary patterns: families. In 1997, she founded the Center for the Prevention of Violence (CEPREV), with the aim of pacifying 36 neighborhoods (barrios) in three districts of Managua and the municipality of Tipitapa, also in the capital of Nicaragua. CEPREV carries out workshops, training, conferences and talks directed to young men, children, and women in the heart of these communities. They also train multipliers of the methods of CEPREV, including police and state officials, teachers, community and religious leaders, and journalists.
According to its report, CEPREV has dismantled more than 120 gangs in Nicaragua. “Nearly 13,000 young people in gangs and/or youth groups have been trained by CEPREV and a majority of them have abandoned violence, drug use and gang membership, and have integrated into work or study,” says the organization’s website.
Sabine Drysdale interviewed Mónica Zalaquett for the Chilean newspaper La Tercera. “Being born a man is not enough. You have to prove all your life that you are. There is a tested, conditioned masculinity that is not free. And the first patriarchal mandate is violence. If you don’t act violently, you are not a man. You don’t realize it, but you spend your whole life in fear of being doubted. It’s a yoke,” said Zalaquett. This is why she thinks “being born a man is a risk factor”.
Zalaquett has done the same job of dismantling violent patterns with the narcos, guerrillas and gang members in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador (the maras), Costa Rica. Also in Chile, where he was at the time of the interview, “in a more limited way.” More than 50,000 people have benefited in these countries.
–Have you seen the young people on the front lines [in the recent protests in Chile] confronting the carabineros? Muscular, without a shirt, hooded, violent, brave, sweating testosterone –the journalist asked in the interview.
–Yes, they are the same as the gang members of Central America–Mónica Zalaquett replied.
Zalaquett has worked in the barrios and also in the prisons.
“Machismo really has been like the worst and sickest version of masculinity, but in our society it is considered normal, because violence is a condition of masculinity,” continued the director of CEPREV in another interview with SIEP. She speaks about a distortion that the culture of patriarchy has generated coming from “the sense of ownership over people.
“Violence is the consequence of the abuse of power that comes from a patriarchal culture. A deep-rooted culture that has made men believe something very false, which is that machismo is a success of masculinity, when in fact it makes them suffer,” she added in the conversation with Drysdale for La Tercera.
So Zalaquett has perceived that violence begins in the belief that some people are worth more than others “and therefore have more rights, and from that come the power relationships between human beings, which are the root of all forms of violence,” as she said in the interview with SIEP.
CEPREV counts among its achievements the decrease in crime and homicides in the 36 Managua barrios where they have worked. “In the last two years, the homicide rate has decreased by 37% and the number of people injured by 67%. In schools, the decline of violence has reached 70%.
The organization has also created regional networks on violence prevention and arms control and “increased social awareness of the causes and consequences of violence, the relationship between domestic violence and other forms of violence, and appropriate ways to prevent them,” says the CEPREV website.
A profound change in the culture of violence, Monica Zalaquett says, will not depend on the State. The State is only the expression up there of all of us, and what we criticize in the State happens in many, many families. Of course, the State is the maximum expression of that culture, and they are not going to be interested in making a change at the root, that change has to be made by us,” she said in the interview with SIEP.