Ten-year-old Diego lives beside the train tracks in the centre of Guatemala City. He has two older brothers, who belong to rival gangs. A year ago one of Diego’s brothers was shot in the stomach by a member of the other brother’s gang.

Diego is not in a gang. He had been taking lessons in photography at Fotokids, an organisation that attempts to bring young people in Guatemala out of poverty by providing training in the visual arts. He had dropped out of the organisation, claiming it was too much hard work, but returned shortly after he left.

“He came in one day and said to me, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, this is a really good project, would you accept me back?’,” recollects Nancy McGirr, who founded the organisation 18 years ago. “He is now here every other day in the morning, without fail, and not only is he doing his work but he is enthusiastically involving himself.”

A history of violence

In 1996 Guatemala emerged from a 36-year civil war during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and a further 40,000 disappeared. When peace accords were finally negotiated between the government and left-wing rebels, there was renewed optimism that this would bring an end to years of ceaseless violence. Yet just over a decade later spiralling gang related crime has seen politically motivated violence replaced by more widespread social and economic violence.

A recent study by the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) highlighted the severity of the situation, reporting that Guatemala, along with Honduras and El Salvador, had the world’s highest rates of non-political homicide. In Guatemala the murder rate soared to over 6,000 deaths last year, compared to a reported 2,655 homicides in 1999.  How many of these killings are gang-related is impossible to determine as little effort is made to categorise the murders. Yet the public clearly attributes the rise in deaths to the increased presence of youth gangs.

“There is so much violence one walks around in fear all the time,” observes Hermelinda Castro, 50, who is employed as a cook for the students at Fotokids. “We all fear constantly for the lives of our children. Poverty prompts young people who are unemployed to join gangs. I see it happen all the time in my neighbourhood,” she continues, while stirring a huge steaming pot of chicken casserole that will be served-up for lunch when the students arrive. “Just recently a boy I know, whose mum is an alcoholic, joined a gang because he had nothing to do. Now he is dead. The thing is young people see gangs as a way out, as an end to their poverty, but it’s not like that.” Hermelinda’s own daughter, Evelyn, started taking classes at Fotokids when she was ten years old. Now aged 27, she is in charge of much of the organisation’s administrative work.

Fotokids has its headquarters in an uncommonly quiet and mainly residential area in Guatemala City. Its high walls mask from passer-bys the bustling activity to be found inside. On any given afternoon there will be around 40 young people in the building; some will be taking classes on digital imaging, others will be creating their own magazine, groups will be huddled around a computer-screen editing the images and video clips taken at home. Regardless of the activity, cameras tend to be out and at the ready.

The organisation also runs programmes in Santiago de Atitlan, the largest town along the banks of Guatemala’s volcano-encircled Lake Atitlan, and in Las Mangas, Honduras, a village that sits on the edge of one of the country’s biggest national parks.

Santiago Kids, by Sara Atjujal

Most students have had encounters with gangs. Berlin Juarez began going to Fotokids fifteen years ago when the organisation selected ten people from his neighbourhood to take up classes. Now aged 27 he is employed as a teacher at Fotokids. He says that although gang violence has since escalated, it was still very much prevalent when he was growing up.

“I lived in Zona 12, a part of the city where there was no running water, no electricity, just houses made of tin and wood,” he recalls matter-of-factly. “Before I joined Fotokids I would go to school during the day but in the afternoons I had nothing to do except hang around my neighbourhood. I knew nearly all the maras there, lots of my friends joined them and lots of them were killed, but I wasn’t involved in what they were doing. When I started at Fotokids it took up all my time, so I didn’t hang out with the maras at all anymore”.

Berlin says that youth involvement in gangs extends largely from a desire to “escape to a different world,” one far from the depravity and worries of poverty. “The maras make their members feel special, they make them feel famous because of the bad things they do.”

Berlin believes organisations like Fotokids can have the same effect on young people but by encouraging them to do positive things. “If you make a kid feel special, feel famous, for doing good things, if you make him feel like that by teaching him about photography, by having his photograph in an exhibition, then it produces the same result.”

Gaining a sense of belonging is clearly a key draw of joining a gang. Fotokids offers a similar sense of camaraderie – albeit by urging its member to point and shoot with a camera instead of a gun. “None of the kids who have been at Fotokids have joined maras because the project gave them something to do… and a sense of belonging to a group,” says Berlin.

Living with the maras

The question of why gang violence in Guatemala has become so prevalent in recent years is disputed. The proliferation of drugs passing through the country is the most commonly cited explanation. The scale of the drugs issue can be demonstrated by recent claims from US authorities that 75 per cent of cocaine smuggled into the US passes through Guatemala.

Francisco Tavico, of the UNDP in Guatemala, says the issue is more complex. According to Tavico the surge in gang-related crime stems back to the legacy of violence left behind by the civil war, the deep social and economic inequalities in the country and the government’s failure to invest the capital needed to improve education and employment. “Then you add to this situation the drugs issue, as Guatemala is a natural corridor for drugs passing through on there way to the US, and the maras get caught up in this,” he explains.

Tavico highlights that young people are in the paradoxical position of being both the victims and the perpetrators of this situation. “It is young people who are the most at risk,” he explains. “They are at a crucial, formative time in their lives when they need to find their path, and there are very limited options open to them, why? Because they cannot find employment or educational opportunities.”

Employment Prospects

In this way, an organisation like Fotokids manages to provide a way out. Not only do their students have a recreational environment in which to meet and hang out with their peers, they gain a creative education and the possibility of future employment.

“The idea of the foundation is that you get taught and then you teach what you learn to others,” says Linda Morales, 24, who started attending lessons at Fotokids when she was nine-years-old after being recommended by an aid worker in her neighbourhood. Linda, a petite young woman with straight, shoulder-length brown hair and delicate features that hide behind her large glasses, now teaches a series of courses at the organisation. Over the years, Linda has travelled the world, from Uganda to San Francisco, to attend exhibitions of her work and complete photographic commissions.

Little Angel, by Jessica Aguilar

In addition to teaching classes, former students are employed in the administrative and management side of the organisation, creating a unique sustainability as those who learn are trained to stay on and work. This emphasis on a closed loop underscores the circumstances in which Fotokids operates. A school is often thought of as a place that prepares its students to spread their wings and enter society. However when the society is fractured, a school might also serve to cocoon its students from a dangerous outside world.

The sense of solidarity for their peers and gratitude towards the organisation felt among the former students now teaching at the school is palpable. Linda says that it was her idea to have the older students start teaching the younger ones, as she thought it would be a good way of demonstrating her thanks to the organisation.

These former students have also begun expanding the project. Linda is keen to find the funds to develop programmes in rural areas of Guatemala, where poverty is experienced most severely.

Similarly, Evelyn now runs classes for children with HIV who are living in the local orphanage. She also set up a girls-only class, called “Save our Girls”, which uses photography as an empowerment tool in a country that has the highest femicide rate in the world after Russia.

Evelyn and Berlin are now married after meeting as students at Fotokids 17 years ago. The pair, along with other Fotokids alumni, have also set up a design agency called Jakaramba, which offers video, digital imaging, web and graphic design services. Forty per cent of the profits go to the staff members who participated in the project and the other 60 per cent goes back into Fotokids, “so that we can offer more kids grants to join the project,” Berlin explains. “I know how hard it is for young people here (in Guatemala), I know how important it is to try and get them off the streets so that they stay away from gangs, so that is why it is so important for us (the former students) to pay back to the project and ensure it keeps on going.”

Fotokids does not have the capacity to create employment opportunities for all of those who join the project. According to Berlin those who work at the organisation do so because they want to, while those who move on to other things are motivated by wanting to work elsewhere. “People who have left now do all kinds of things,” he says proudly. “Some of them work in companies, others work in hospitals. There is even a boy who is a fireman”.

There are plenty of inspiring stories of those who finished at the organisation and are now studying law or working as company managers, but there are also the realities of those who dropped out and fell off the radar.

Nancy estimates that around 40 per cent of each intake stay with the project until they complete their formal education, with the majority then continuing on to university. The 60 per cent who leave tend to do so after having completed three – five years at Fotokids.

“There are various reasons why they go,” says Nancy of those who leave the organisation before they finish their formal education. “They have to work to bring money into the house, they want to get married, their mums don’t want them to go to school anymore … I mean it is their whole life they’ve been taking pictures and stuff, and then they are just like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to do something else, I want to play football with my friends’ or what not.”

Still the crucial point remains: each of the 600 or so young people who have passed through Fotokids’ doors in the last 18 years was given a chance.

“Personally, I was given this opportunity and I made the most out of it by learning as much as I could learn from it,” says Berlin resolutely. “Now I am putting what I learnt into practice by working with kids and teaching them what I know. I was an adolescent once” he says, sniggering at the thought of his rebellious years. “I also rebelled like some of them do now, so I understand them. I often say to them: ‘Listen, I was where you are, I understand what you are going through, but you have now been given a chance to do the right thing, so do it while you can’.”

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The Fotokids building was recently been broken into and all the computers and cameras were stolen. The organisation is trying to raise funds to replace the equipment they lost and continue their valuable work. To donate and help get Fotokids back to normal as quickly as possible please visit: http://www.fotokids.org/ and click on “make a donation”.

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THE GALLERY:

The Returned Ones, by Berlin Juarez

Family History, by Daniel Gonzalez

The Melon, by Yamilet Salvador

The Refugees Returning from the Mountains, by Berlin Juarez

Manglares, by Luis Yanez

Storekeeper, by Atitlano Perez

Dancing, by Rosario Lopez

Looking at Rain, by Evelyn Mansilla

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The project that is the source of this piece was the winner of an investigative journalism grant from AVINA. The concepts, opinions and other aspects of the content of the investigation are the exclusive responsibility of the author and/or the publisher.

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