In an impoverished neighborhood in Guatemala known for its violent gang activity, a handful of youngsters show visitors around a small compound next to a playground and soccer field. Although the buildings have dirt floors and few amenities, they represent a future for these children—one designed to keep them beyond the reaches of gangs.

Mentors hired by the community help the youths with their studies there, encourage them to stay in school, teach them how to plant and cultivate a garden, and remind them of the dangers associated with gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street.

Most of the children live with those dangers on a daily basis. Gang crime is severe in Guatemala. An average of nearly 16 homicides occur daily in the country, and most of them are gang-related. “My goal is to stay in school and one day become an auto mechanic,” one of the boys in the program said. “With gangs, there is no future.”

The youth program in the impoverished outskirts of Villa Nueva—Guatemala’s second largest city—is called Project Hope and is an example of how communities are working to fight the gang threat through prevention as well as police intervention. That deterrence approach—keeping young people from being recruited by gangs—is a fundamental goal of the Central American Community Impact Exchange (CACIE) program, an FBI-led initiative.

CACIE recently conducted a training class for law enforcement and community leaders from six Central American countries and the U.S. aimed at exposing participants to community-based prevention programs that work so they might be implemented in other places.

“We want to change the culture in these dangerous neighborhoods,” said Luis Ramirez, a National Civilian Police officer in Guatemala. His department has placed a new emphasis on community-based policing, recently launching a 14-month training program in which graduating officers will have the equivalent of a master’s degree in community policing.

The youth program in the impoverished outskirts of Villa Nueva—Guatemala’s second largest city—is called Project Hope and is an example of how communities are working to fight the gang threat through prevention as well as police intervention. That deterrence approach—keeping young people from being recruited by gangs—is a fundamental goal of the Central American Community Impact Exchange (CACIE) program, an FBI-led initiative.

CACIE recently conducted a training class for law enforcement and community leaders from six Central American countries and the U.S. aimed at exposing participants to community-based prevention programs that work so they might be implemented in other places.

“We want to change the culture in these dangerous neighborhoods,” said Luis Ramirez, a National Civilian Police officer in Guatemala. His department has placed a new emphasis on community-based policing, recently launching a 14-month training program in which graduating officers will have the equivalent of a master’s degree in community policing.

“We are constantly working on strategies to investigate the gangs and to stop the threat,” Ramirez said. “Community programs to keep kids from joining gangs are one more strategy. We need to pay more attention to these at-risk kids.”

In Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America, many teens don’t go to school and don’t work. Often, they come from broken homes, their parents are not around, and they are unsupervised. “The goal is to keep these youths from being idle,” Ramirez said, “and to give them hope for the future.” But resources to create and fund after-school and other programs like Project Hope are often in scarce supply in Central American countries like Guatemala.

“These are very challenging circumstances,” Ramirez acknowledged. But a unified effort can make a difference, as CACIE participants saw in Villa Nueva and in Durham, North Carolina (see sidebar). “We all work together—the church, private enterprise, and the state,” Ramirez said. “Individually, we might not have resources, but everyone can bring something to the table. Communities are made by everyone.”

“We hope this year’s CACIE class will take the best of what they learned and implement similar programs in their own communities,” said Special Agent Rich Baer, who helps administer the program. “Because of the strong bonds they formed during the program, we are confident they will be good resources for each other going forward.”