“Peace is possible”: How a program in Loíza is transforming community

LOÍZA, Puerto Rico — Sneakers squeak across an outdoor court in Tocones as a young basketball player in a dark jersey evades two defenders guarding the hoop. Under the blare of floodlights, the player shoots. Onlookers erupt into cheers as the ball sails cleanly through the basket and bounces back to earth; their enthusiastic cries rivaling the sonorous evening chorus of the coquí.

Watching the teenagers play their competitive late night game, it is difficult to believe that the court where Loíza’s youth routinely gather for local basketball tournaments used to be too risky of a hangout spot even during daylight hours.

For many years violent conflicts between neighborhood gangs plagued Loíza’s Tocones community. These dangerous conditions disrupted many peoples’ lives, deterring residents from gathering in public spaces out of fear for their physical safety.

“We couldn’t even sit in our front living room. We couldn’t get together with our family. We couldn’t play outside. There was a lot of violence,” Alicia Carrasquillo Ortiz, a community leader in Tocones, recalled.

A lifelong resident of Tocones and fierce advocate for her community, Carrasquillo Ortiz has seen her neighborhood through thick and thin. She calls herself a “multifunctional woman” because of the many roles she plays in Tocones: president of the community board; food manager for a school; and volunteer. On the day of our interview, her skin was covered with paint residue from fixing roofs in the community.

“In Loíza, there used to exist a type of violence of one neighborhood against another,” Carrasquillo Ortiz explained. The gang disputes created a sense of isolation and distrust in the community, making it difficult to even ask next-door neighbors for sugar or rice, she said.

But the kind of territorial violence Carrasquillo Ortiz described has decreased steadily in Loíza over the last decade. The youth are more involved in community projects and local events, such as basketball tournaments, picnics and horseback riding. Even young people from nearby towns regularly come to play in Loíza’s recreational areas—sometimes late into the night.

From Carrasquillo Ortiz’s perspective, the catalyst behind the change is clear.

“It’s thanks to the Acuerdo de Paz program that we can finally breathe fresh air,” she said. “When they intervened, thank God, it created a barrier of ‘stop, that’s enough, let’s coexist.’”

Acuerdo de Paz (or “Peace Agreement”, in English) is a community-centered, evidence-based violence reduction initiative that has operated in Loíza since 2011. Spearheaded by feminist organization Taller Salud, the program disrupts violence by identifying and interrupting potentially dangerous situations, mediating conflicts and empowering community members to foster a culture of peace through dialogue and education campaigns.

“Our main goal is to minimize the violent deaths of our people,” said Zinnia Alejandro, the peace and development initiative director at Taller Salud. “We trust in human beings that they can transform their ways of resolving conflicts. That’s why we’re here.”

Taller Salud’s approach to conflict resolution and reconciliation in Loíza has proven successful. Loíza’s murder rate has declined significantly in the last 13 years since the Peace Agreement was implemented in the community, according to municipal crime data.

When Acuerdo de Paz launched in 2011, Puerto Rico experienced its highest murder rate since 1994 with a record number of 1,136 homicides across the archipelago, according to national crime data maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The 2011 murder epidemic in Puerto Rico disproportionately impacted Loíza, which reported 43 homicides that year. This accounted for approximately 165 homicides per 100,000 people, in contrast to roughly 30.6 homicides per 100,000 people nationwide in Puerto Rico.  

After Acuerdo de Paz’s first full year in Loíza, the municipality reported 23 homicides in 2012, a 47% decrease in the number of violent deaths from the previous year.

Last year, there were 14 homicides, marking a 67% reduction in violent deaths from when Acuerdo de Paz began operations in Loíza, according to data from the Puerto Rico Police Bureau.

But Taller Salud does not solely measure the Peace Agreement’s success through downward trends in Loíza’s death data. The organization also maintains an internal database of peace interventions facilitated by its violence interrupters and community outreach workers. Acuerdo de Paz documents 405 peace interventions monthly with their 45 high-risk participants—which are young people who carry weapons, who have been released from prison, are serving probation, or have been involved in a recent shooting or violent event. The community outreach team handles six visits and three calls per month per participant, said Yamilin Rivera Santiago, Taller Salud’s communications and development director

“[The Peace Agreement] has created consciousness so that we can live healthily. We’ve returned to trust; to unity,” Carrasquillo Ortiz said. “You can feel the peace.”

The origins of ‘No más muertes violentas’ campaign

Nestled on the coast, approximately 23 miles east of San Juan, Loíza is a vibrant seaside community with a rich Afro-Caribbean culture. Renowned as “La Capital de la Tradición” in Puerto Rico, Loíza’s distinct folk art, music and local cuisine is deeply rooted in the community’s Taino and African heritage.

The municipality derives its name from Yuisa, Puerto Rico’s first Taino Cacica (indigenous woman chief), who led her tribe during the Spanish invasion of Boriquén in the 16th century.

Two of Puerto Rico’s 19 bomba dance styles originated from liberated Maroons in Loíza, including the fastest style of bomba performed on the archipelago.

In addition to the community’s celebrated Afro-Puerto Rican traditions, Loíza has a documented local history of women-led activism and resistance to social injustice. For example, Loíza’s struggle against forcible displacement in the 1980s grew out of the martyrdom of Adolfina Villanueva Osorio, a 34-year-old mother who was murdered by police after she protested the government’s attempted appropriation of her property for the Catholic Church. Today, Villanueva Osorio’s lot remains empty, but her legacy as a housing activist and martyr continues to inspire women leaders in Loíza.

Despite the municipality’s close proximity to Puerto Rico’s capital city, Loíza is “near the bottom of the list” when it comes to governmental aid and social services, said Rivera Santiago. Consequently, Loíza’s predominantly Black community has endured systemic racism, poverty and social exclusion for generations.

Loíza’s youth in particular have suffered from the community’s marginalized status. There are few employment opportunities available for young people in Loíza. And those who venture outside of the municipality for jobs sometimes face discrimination from employers who will not hire them based on their address—especially if they live in public housing.

Economic instability and social marginalization enabled neighborhood gangs to flourish in Loíza. These gangs provided disenfranchised youth with a way to earn income in the underground economy and fulfill a missing sense of belonging. At the same time, the gangs exacerbated violence in the community through territorial disputes and revenge killings.

Today, the most common motivations attributed to violent deaths in Loíza are revenge killings, disputes and drug-related homicides, according to crime data from the Puerto Rico Police Bureau.

A turning point came on Sept. 30, 2009 when three teenagers—Luis O’Neill Carrasquillo Cirino, Luis Joel López Meléndez and Jonathan Carrasquillo Carrasquillo—were killed in a gang-related shooting during a basketball practice at El Ceiba basketball courts. The massacre shocked the community. El Ceiba was supposed to be neutral territory, but the shooting exposed the chilling reality that gang violence in Loíza could encroach on youths’ lives at any moment.

In the aftermath of the basketball massacre, Alana Feldman Soler, who was the executive director of Taller Salud at the time, felt determined to find a peacebuilding model that could be implemented in Loíza. Her research eventually led her to Cure Violence (formerly Ceasefire-Chicago), a Chicago, Illinois-based violence prevention program that aims to disrupt endemic patterns of violence through on-the-ground conflict interruption, outreach and community mobilization.

Developed in 1995 at the University of Chicago (Illinois) by epidemiologist and physician Gary Slutkin, the Cure Violence model addresses violence from a public health perspective. Like a metaphorical vaccine inoculating patients against a contagious virus, Cure Violence concentrates on mitigating risky behaviors for community members who are most likely to engage in or become victims of violence in the near future.

When Taller Salud decided to replicate Cure Violence’s prevention model in Puerto Rico, representatives from Chicago visited Loíza to train staff on how to recognize and manage violence.

“One of the opportunities that Chicago opened up for us is being able to see our situation from a different perspective,” Alejandro said. She elaborated: “We didn’t know how to distinguish [violence] from a different environment that wasn’t violence.”

Learning to identify, interrupt and transform violence through the Cure Violence framework was an empowering experience for the Acuerdo de Paz team, Alejandro explained. Changing their understanding of violence, from inevitable to preventable, enabled the team to model healthy conflict resolution and restorative justice with Loíza’s youth. In turn, youth who participate in Acuerdo de Paz model these values to their peers, their parents and the broader community, creating a ripple effect that challenges the normalization of violence in Loíza.

“We have changed our mindset, and we’re not going back,” Alejandro said. “We are dis-authorizing violence in our communities.”

‘Aquí cabemos todos’

The grieving mothers, wives and sisters of the young men who had been murdered in Loíza inspired Acuerdo de Paz’s first programming. The program coordinator, Scherezada Fuentes, told 9 Millones that these women said they needed help dealing with the pain. As a response, Taller Salud started holding community meetings where families of slain loved ones could express their grief and discuss the impact of violence in their community.

“There’s a big difference between when you go into a neighborhood and say what needs to be done versus when we go to a neighborhood to observe, sit and listen,” Alejandro said. “When the community is the one that brings solutions, restorative justice is built.”

Looking to the community to inform their programming also shaped how the Acuerdo de Paz team adapted the Cure Violence framework to better fit Loíza’s cultural context.

One of the major departures from the original Cure Violence model was intentionally excluding police from the program. In Chicago, law enforcement was actively involved during the developmental stages of Cure Violence, providing feedback and resources and helping pilot Ceasefire in West Garfield Park. If conflicts escalated during mediations, violence interrupters called police to intervene.

Taller Salud initially followed suit during the first few years of the Peace Agreement in Loíza. In their interactions with community members, however, the team quickly realized that police involvement was hindering their ability to connect and build trust with at-risk youth. Most of the program’s participants have experienced negative encounters with police in the past, according to Taller Salud staff. Additionally, when officers intervened in conflicts between young people in Loíza, they tended to resort to arrests regardless of whether the situation warranted detainment or not, according to several violence interrupters from Acuerdo de Paz.

Today, when at-risk youth opt in to Acuerdo de Paz, they are assured that violence interrupters will not call police for conflicts involving program participants.  It’s a promise Taller Salud takes seriously. “We have to keep our word,” Rivera Santiago said.

“They come to see us as a safe place,” added Joanaymarie Rosa Cepeda, a member of Acuerdo de Paz’s community outreach team. “We will never go against the participants… we are here to help them change positively and reach their goals,” she said.

‘Vivir en paz en Loíza es posible’  

On weekends, violence interrupters patrol beachside bars around Piñones, a popular hangout spot for locals from Loíza and nearby municipalities. They share informational pamphlets about Acuerdo de Paz with passersby, and keep their eyes open for potentially belligerent bar attendees. If a fight appears close to breaking out, the violence interrupters intervene and try to talk down the disputants.  

Acuerdo de Paz staff closely monitor social media feeds for threatening messages made by or against program participants. When a young person is targeted by gangs, violence interrupters and community outreach workers move quickly to check in with the individual and—in dire situations where danger seems imminent—move them to a safer location outside of Loíza.

Community integration is equally important than these quick responses during potentially violent situations. Acuerdo de Paz facilitates recreational activities for young people, such as their widely popular basketball tournaments. On game days, the outdoor basketball courts are packed with youth, their families and community members, who show up for the free food Acuerdo de Paz provides.

“It’s a way to change the narrative that the community is not safe. [We show] that we can all get together, have fun and share our experience in a secure place,” explained Wesley Polaco Méndez, one of Acuerdo de Paz’s violence interrupters.

The community outreach team celebrates participants’ birthdays with cake or singing “Happy Birthday” to them in person or over the phone. “When we are in the community, the [young people] worry to make sure that their neighbors can eat cake. Even the neighbors come to celebrate,” Fuentes said.

“They start to value life more. Many times, I have seen them celebrating their birthdays and they think ‘I shouldn’t have reached 25’ or ‘people didn’t expect me to get here.’ So, they start to create this sense of value—this sense that their life matters,” Polaco Méndez said. “They start to see their lives as important.”

Despite the evident success of Acuerdo de Paz’s approach to reducing violence in Loíza, obtaining funding sources for the program remains a challenge. Under the Obama administration, Acuerdo de Paz secured a three-year federal grant from 2012 to 2015, which allowed Taller Salud to hire full-time violence interrupters and community outreach workers for the program. Since 2016, however, Acuerdo de Paz has not received consistent funding from the federal government.

In addition to financial uncertainty, the kind of intensive peacebuilding work that Acuerdo de Paz entails can leave a heavy emotional toll on its staff—especially in situations where a meditation falls apart or a violent situation escalates before Acuerdo de Paz staff have time to intervene.

“We have lost a lot of young people in our work, young people that we did not want to lose,” Alejandro said. “The pain from the loss… gives us strength to continue working.”

In fact, some of the organization’s members' vision is that other communities in Puerto Rico could adopt this type of program. “Right now, it is the only program that works on community violence,” states Fuentes.

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This story was possible thanks to support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Journalist Carlos Berrios Polanco contributed interpretation and translation of interviews, as well as photography for this story. Journalist Laura M. Quintero contributed editing. Journalist Luis Alfaro contributed copyediting and Spanish translation.