By Steven Ambrus

It was a potentially fatal situation. A group of teen-aged girls in Medellín, Colombia, had accused a boy of sexually harassing them. Former members of an armed youth militia, outraged, threatened the boy with banishment from the neighborhood and even death. The boy expected to be lynched at any moment on a street corner.

But mediators from Moravia's Conflict Resolution Center found out and immediately summoned the accused, the accusers and the militia members to give testimony. They then held days of extensive hearings and reached a conclusion accepted by all: the supposed "assault" was nothing but hearsay embellished by a bevy of gossips.

"A few years ago simple rumors like that might have resulted in that boy's death at the hands of a gang," said Hernando Roldán, the 42-year-old director of the Resolution Center. "But mediation has become a reference point. Any dispute, large or small, is referred to conciliators who live in the neighborhood and have the moral authority to find an amicable solution."

A Tough Roster of 5,000 Cases

Since its founding in 1995, the resolution center's conciliators – eight adults and six youths – have mediated nearly 5,000 rent, property and border disputes and allegations of theft, sexual abuse and prostitution. They have managed to stop summary trials at kangaroo courts and have even gotten this traditionally lawless neighborhood to conceive of itself as a functioning legal system.

The project's success has led four other neighborhoods to set up centers with Roldán's help. Two high schools have begun mediation training as a way to stop teen-age rivalries and gang violence from spilling over into hallway muggings and killings. And government authorities, usually absent in poor neighborhoods, have shown strong interest in duplicating the experiment as one of the few that have managed to contain – and even reverse – 15 years of gang and drug violence in Medellín.

But Roldán, a thin, wiry man with cropped hair and a penetrating gaze, knows the risks. The murder rate, now at 10 people a year, was more than 55 in 1992, according to Medellín's Peace Office. That was the year when he first entered this shantytown, whose 40,000 inhabitants live on Medellín's former dump, as a social worker.

Militias armed with sub-machine guns cruised the streets. Thugs extorted shop owners, staged impromptu trials and executed suspected thieves and drug traffickers on street corners. Rival factions murdered each other mercilessly.

Only after the municipal government offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil engineering projects for the township and construction jobs and job training for the militias did they eventually consider peace. And only under considerable pressure from the community did the militias sign a peace agreement, disband and turn to Roldán to make the new peace work.

Replacing Militiamen With Mediators

"This was an incredibly violent neighborhood, one of Medellín's worst, a place settled by squatters without legal title to their land or homes, without police presence or a functioning judicial system, which was fertile ground for the militias because they offered to provide order," Roldán said. "We needed to start over again, to create new structures with more peaceful, less painful means of resolving problems."

Security forces based in Moravia had been so abusive that town leaders petitioned for them to be transferred. The police, corrupted by drug traffickers and other criminals, created distrust among the residents and feared to enter the township to confront the militias. The courts, plagued by inefficiency, were practically useless, a failing reflected in the fact that 97 perent of all criminal cases go unsolved.

But Roldán had experience with alternative community structures. He had worked as a teen-ager organizing children's brigades to upgrade the tiny tarpaper-and-cardboard homes of squatters with better materials, and then in a successful broad-based movement to force the government to provide fresh water, sewage and electricity to Medellín's poorest neighborhoods.

Roldán had graduated as a lawyer from the Autonomous Latin American University in Medellín with a thesis on conflict resolution in Moravia, and studied community organizing and leadership there. He knew the community could govern itself.

True, it had fallen victim to death squads, its leaders wiped out or silenced during the 1980's "dirty war" against labor and community activists. But the older tradition of self-government could be revived. Why not take that capacity for leadership and build on it to forge new grass-roots structures that would guarantee the peace?

Drawing on a Tradition of Self-Government

"I wanted to use the communities' traditional values and human resources to resolve conflicts without violence and without having to resort to the courts, prosecutors or police." Roldán said. "I couldn't see how anyone would object."

By 1995, he was attending virtually every event in Moravia – town meetings, youth festivals, concerts, soccer games – to sell his ideas on conflict resolution and to shop for mediators. Though anyone with leadership experience could apply, the response was overwhelming. Some 25 adults and 15 teen-agers were either nominated or came forward themselves, including former militia members, band directors, dance promoters and leaders of youth groups.

Two training courses, from several days to a month each, were provided by lawyers from the Ministry of Justice and the Popular Training Institute. And the authorities, seeing the center as a potentially effective way to reduce violence, gave their nod.

"We spent weeks learning to clarify points of view, to depersonalize arguments with special emphasis on self-esteem and human rights," said Marcela Vergara, a petite, 23-year-old former youth leader who began her training in 1995 and immediately found herself mediating a tense rent dispute.

Hector Alvarez, 17, recalls working with two other young mediators to stop an armed confrontation on the street between two groups of teen-agers enraged over a suspected theft. He remembers then organizing sessions with five mediators, the teenagers, their parents and the local parish priest.

"It was a situation in which one of the youths might easily have been executed," he said. "Then we got into mediation, and though no one would own up to the theft, we managed to get the groups to commit to a nonaggression pact and friendly meetings to discuss shared problems. It was an incredibly enriching experience for me as a mediator, and an enlightening one for me as a youth leader."

The Advantages of Youth

Roldán found that their openness, frankness and even innocence made the young mediators particularly valuable in resolving conflicts. He remembers one case in which two couples spent months insulting each other, assaulting each other and scandalizing the neighborhood because of jealousy and allegations of adultery. "The presence of a teen-age mediator shamed the couples into speaking respectfully and honestly and getting them to own up to the problem," he said.

But there was an even more important benefit for the young mediators themselves. Youth groups of every kind had been brought into community decision-making in Moravia in 1993 to strengthen the consensus for peace. They had in effect taken part in an informal government, making their opinions felt at town meetings and heavily influencing decisions on issues of direct relevance to them, like the use of recreational facilities or park space.

By recruiting mediators from among youth group leaders, Roldán gave young people an added and important sense of empowerment. This was especially so given the strained atmosphere in Medellín, where police had previously felt entitled to search and arrest any teen-ager merely because he came from a place so poor and violent.

"After years of being ignored and abused, mediating gave many of the youths a sense of being important, of exercising authority and participating in the development of their community," Roldán said. "That sense of responsibility kindled in them questions of morality and values, of where we were going as a society and where we wanted to go, of what we were as a city and a country."

Of Gun Control and Jobs

Last April, mediators were forced to deal directly with such questions when several of Moravia's shopowners, faced with rising theft, approached a group of unemployed former militia members to hire them to patrol the streets. Throughout a long, hot day, four teen-agers and eight adult mediators gathered with shopowners and the former militiamen in a battered concrete schoolroom to discuss the impending danger and to find a way of preventing a confrontation. They spoke of the hardships of the former delinquents' lives. They spoke of gun control, of jobs, of the failure of the government's anti-poverty program. And they agreed that no one would take up arms illegally.

"We must think of what we will be in 10 years, what we can do for employment and development if we don't let the neighborhood get sucked into violence again," Alvarez said.

Since 1995 four former gang members, who had made peace and trained as mediators, have been gunned down in revenge killings. Armed groups of all ideologies have attempted to penetrate the nation's poor neighborhoods. Roldán sees dangers everywhere. But after investing so much in conflict resolution, he believes it offers one of the few opportunities to build civic values and pacify lawless communities.

"I have had the good fortune to share with local leaders the challenge of recovering solid community values that were buried under violence," Roldán said. "It has been an absolutely fundamental experience, a lesson in constructing a new way of living today so as to be able to confront the future tomorrow."